The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Pointless..]

This experiment was inspired by Chinese theory, and in particular by Stolfi’s theses about the scribe’s mistake and writing by ear.  ... I tried to create such a “phonetic” script for the Ingush language. I used not only letters (but not all of them) as symbols, but also very common syllables in words in the text.

That's a very interesting experiment.  I should try a similar one: post an audio clip in some language and ask for a volunteer who does not know how to write that language to try to write down the sounds they hear, using whatever spelling system they chooses, and then see how consistent the result was.  Namely, if they always wrote the same word in the same way.

To better approximate the dictation scenario of the Chinese Theory, the volunteer ideally should be somehow familiar with the spoken language, even partly understand it, but they have no idea of its official spelling or even the nuances of its phonetics.  Maybe playing Portuguese to an Italian speaker, Dutch to an English speaker, Czech to a Polish speaker...

All the best, --stolfi

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What this study tries to prove is, that while an individual non-speaker cannot reliably transcribe a foreign language on their own, a statistical model aggregating dozens of non-speakers can reconstruct the target text with surprisingly high precision.