Lvxferre [he/him]

Okay, here’s a silly explanation.

Imagine two people want to communicate. They shall be named Alice and Bob. It’s night, and they’re too far away to hear each other; but each has an electric torch, and they can see the light coming off the other person’s torch.

Those torches are fancy. They have two settings: “strong” (big arse blinding light) and “weak” (wee light, but still visible). Let’s call a strong flash “1” and a weak flash “0” for short.

They also have a code, that they use to interpret the flashes of light that they send each other. Here it is; check the “binary” column. For example, if Alice sent Bob a weak flash, then a strong flash, then weak, strong, weak, weak, strong, strong, then Bob is supposed to interpret this as an “S”.

This is already enough to communicate. Like this:

• Alice: 0000 0010 0100 1000 0110 1001 0010 0000 0100 0010 0110 1111 0110 0010 0000 0011
• Bob: 0000 0010 0101 0011 0111 0101 0111 0000 0011 1111 0000 0011

Remember, each “0” is a weak flash and each “1” is a strong flash. When we decode it with the table from the link, here’s what you get:

• Alice: Hi Bob
• Bob: Sup?

Now. Messing around with the settings of a torchlight is slow, painful, and annoying. So is to watch closely for light flashes, write them down, and decode them with a table. So… let’s use machines to do so?

• Encoder: a fancy machine with a built-in torch. You type “S” down that machine, and it outputs weak, strong, weak, strong, weak, weak, strong, strong flashes in this order.
• Decoder: another fancy machine. It has an optical sensor; if it gets the exact sequence of flashes from above, it’ll output “S”.

Okay, now let’s replace the torch. We want something that emits light that you can see from as far as reasonably possible; like, from Mars if you want. We could instead use light that has been amplified by radiation, it’s really strong and directed. The common name for that is “laser”.

In this context “politics” clearly conveys “things directly related to governments, such as wars, elections, or socio-economical ideologies”. It is only a subset of the definition of politics that you’re probably using, something like “things direct or indirectly related to human groups and their conflicts of interest”.

We got a whole Lemmy to talk about Israel vs. Hamas, late stage capitalism, elections etc. We could - and should - have at least one community to chill and talk about other stuff, and without that rule we won’t have it. For example without that rule 99.99999% of the content as of late 2024 would be about Trump, as if Americans didn’t have multiple communities to talk about it already.

The oddity here is English, not the languages spoken in India. It’s easy to show it by comparing vowel duration in a few languages:

• Telugu (Dravidian) - short vowels are 70~90ms, long vowels 180~195ms
• Hindi (Indo-European) - vowels are 100~180ms long
• Spanish (Indo-European) - vowels are 130~150ms long (NB: I’m analysing the data for native speakers)
• Japanese (Japonic) - tables IV-V show some data for a short /a/, 70~112ms. I’d expect the long vowels to be thus around 140~220ms, if simply doubling it (Japanese is mostly moraic after all, and open vowels tend to be longer)
• English (Indo-European) - 85~420ms

So yes, your typical language spoken in India is spoken faster than English. That doesn’t say much because probably most languages are spoken faster than English.

Also, keep in mind that “Indian languages” isn’t that useful of a label. It’s a lot like lumping together Basque, Italian, Russian, Hungarian and Maltese as “European languages” - sure, it can be done, but odds are that you won’t get any meaningful conclusion out of it, you know?