{"id":226273,"date":"2025-12-02T00:35:21","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T06:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/natural-language-found-more-complex-than-it-strictly-needs-to-be-and-for-good-reason"},"modified":"2025-12-02T00:35:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T06:35:21","slug":"natural-language-found-more-complex-than-it-strictly-needs-to-be-and-for-good-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/natural-language-found-more-complex-than-it-strictly-needs-to-be-and-for-good-reason","title":{"rendered":"Natural language found more complex than it strictly needs to be\u2014and for good reason"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/natural-language-found-more-complex-than-it-strictly-needs-to-be-and-for-good-reason.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Human languages are complex phenomena. Around 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, some with only a handful of remaining speakers, while others, such as Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi, are spoken by billions. Despite their profound differences, they all share a common function: they convey information by combining individual words into phrases\u2014groups of related words\u2014which are then assembled into sentences. Each of these units has its own meaning, which in combination ultimately form a comprehensible whole.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is actually a very complex structure. Since the natural world tends toward maximizing efficiency and conserving resources, it\u2019s perfectly reasonable to ask why the brain encodes linguistic information in such an apparently complicated way instead of digitally, like a computer,\u201d explains Michael Hahn.<\/p>\n<p>Hahn, Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University, has been examining this question together with his colleague Richard Futrell from the University of California, Irvine. The paper is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41562-025-02336-w\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Human languages are complex phenomena. Around 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, some with only a handful of remaining speakers, while others, such as Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi, are spoken by billions. Despite their profound differences, they all share a common function: they convey information by combining individual words into phrases\u2014groups of related words\u2014which are [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}