In English-speaking societies, we don’t need different words for father’s brother and mother’s brother, because there is no meaningful difference between those relationships. I’m not familiar with Cantonese societies, but I’d wager that people in them have different relationships and obligations to their father’s brothers (and brother’s children) than they do to their mother’s brothers (and sister’s children).
Having separate words for functionally different relationships is practical. Having separate words for functionally identical relationships is inefficient.
One specific place where I have a problem with a limitation of English is in trying to express appreciation of something, ie green beans. We can say “I love green beans” or we can say “I hate” green beans, but there aren’t many words to express any feeling in between. “Ambivalence”, maybe, but you’ll rarely hear anyone say “I’m ambivalant toward green beans”.
There’s also the ridiculous “he/she” thing. I’m trying out “it”, in the way we refer to a baby of unknown sex or an animal. Example; “The chef burned its hand in the hot grease”. Works for me, but some people resent being called “it”. Go figger, eh. Kimmy_Gibbler, you leave me alone. Hear?
mangeorge
That’s one thing where I like Finnish - “hän” is he/she, it doesn’t define the sex. Not only that, but using our “it”-equivalent “se” in everyday speech isn’t weird or uncommon in any way, be it about a cat or a chef or a relative.
Other than that, between English and Finnish effeciency of communication is pretty much a wash: English uses more words but Finnish uses longer words, neither is spoken very fast. I’ve watched some Spanish soap opera and the speed they talk in those is just amazing, entertaining even if you can’t understand a word.
In spoken language there’s two “words” in Finnish that are about as concise as they can get, though: if somebody asks you a question, you can sometimes answer with just “o” or “e”, the former being “yes, I am” (or “yes, it is”) and the latter “no, I’m not”. Not very polite maybe, and definitely not in the dictionary, but perfectly useful in everyday conversations.
(Oh yeah, that’s Finnish “o” and “e” - I’m not good at writing them in phonetic English.)
Could be, but I wouldn’t say that one language is more efficient than the other. Each suits its own purposes best, and each can express all ideas in some form.
My wife is a professional translator and charges by the word (in the French text). If that is a computer file, she uses software to count them. Otherwise, she will take her translated text and add 10%. When she has actually done some comparison counts, she finds that she is actually costing herself a bit, so the French has a bit more than 10% more words. On the other hand, translations generally grow somewhat, so the disparity could be 15%. On the other hand, if you told me that French speakers say 15% more words a minute than English speakers, I wouldn’t argue.
A bit off-topic, but maybe of interest. I once went to a talk given in Japanese. Didn’t understand a word of course, but the speaker had invited me to Japan and was paying me handsomely, so I went out of politeness. But I noticed that he wrote on the board seemed to go awfully slowly and I asked him afterwards (his English was very fluent) and he said that, yes, it was much faster to write entire English words than Kanji, even if each character was a word.
A question I have about the topic: Does English use more syllables for a given meaning? But if so, don’t native speakers (at least in America) slur syllables together for speed, more so than in some other languages?
Thailand is a matrilocal society and there is often an enormous difference in intimacy between self and mother’s family, and self and father’s family. (And I’ve read that even in Western societies, presence of maternal grandmother can be a stronger success predictor than presence of father!) Nevertheless, though Thai has four words for aunt/uncle, they don’t map in the simple way you might expect.
One thing that affects language efficiency is obligatory markers. English obligates tense and mood markers for verbs so in the sentence
it may be impossible to abbreviate without misrepresentation. A different language may avoid this complexity with any lost information unimportant.
Using “they/their” as a singular pronoun for person of unknown gender has been common for many years. Is it in dictionaries yet?
As in “The chef burned their hand in the hot grease”?
I don’t know. Give me a minute, okay?
Actually, my company uses this when telling us of an injury and they do know the gender but don’t want to reveal it. Not for privacy, but for correctness. :rolleyes:
“The worker dropped a box on their foot and squashed their toes”. See a problem there?
Hmmm.
I’ve noticed from reading multi-lingual instruction manuals that the English section (among alphabet based languages) always seems to be the shortest. But that may just mean that English is a more compact language for tech writing.
The sole goal of a language is not to convey information quickly. It also serves poetic and narrative goals. Many of these are deliberately not “rapid” in any way.
There are two types of grammar rules: transparent and opaque. Transparent means it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence. Opaque means it does. Examples:
“He is going home” vs “He go home” vs “She is going home.”
He -> She is opaque.
is going -> go is transparent.
I think English is the only language in the world that requires transparent grammar in many, if not most, sentences. Most other languages will allow transparent grammar to be ignored, dropped, or shortened.
In Korean, for example, if the subject is known, it can be dropped in following sentences:
He is going home vs (He) go home.
In English, for example, there are entire categories of words that have no meaning (“it” in “it is raining” or the “be” verb in passive sentences) and affixes that do not change the meaning (break vs broke vs broken vs breaking). We also have verb tenses that are useless except in extraordinary situations: He had left vs He left. Not to mention all the words we have with silent letters.
Overall, I think that English is absolutely littered with useless, meaningless, or easily replaced structures that are required by some grammar rule or another, while most other languages are not.
I doubt that any speaker of any language would argue with that.
The same idea has been expressed many times in this very thread.
The dictionary definition of the word, I think, fits the OP question just fine.
The answer is;
Sometimes.
Spanish only sounds faster to people who are struggling to understand what’s being said (or if they have no idea at all what is being said). As I became more familiar with Spanish, people suddenly stopped speaking so fast. Obviously the speed they spoke didn’t change, but it became less of a stuggle to translate everything, so it no longer felt quite as much like it was impossible to catch up.
You don’t even have to listen to another language to experience this: take this commerical for example. It came up in the New Englandisms thread, and someone complained that they were speaking “too fast.” But they’re not, it’s the fact that if you don’t know what they mean that makes them seem like they’re speaking quickly. In fact, they’re speaking no faster than anyone I know does, and as long as we’re talking about things people recognize very few people stare at us in bafflement because we speak too fast to be understood.
They’re contractions, not actual words… he’s right tho, they’re generally understood to be affirmative and negative replies to a question. Finnish tends to be precise because of the structure, use of casesuffixes makes it easy to covey the most amount of information in the shortest form possible.
If I came by car it’s “autolla”
if I came from (near) the car “autolta”
if I stepped out from inside the car it’s “autosta”
if *none *of *us *came by car, we’re “autoitta”
And of course you can drop words to make it more streamlined when needed.
Giving commands you can easily use “vasemmalta” to convey the idea that something is either coming from the left, or you heard something on the left side. Whereas if you’re ordering movement to the left you’d say “vasemapaan”.
Actually, to get back to the cars for a bit; while I would normally (using proper grammar) say “tämä on minun autoni” to mean “this is my car” I could also drop everything but “autoni” (car+ first person singular possessive) and still be understood.
Oh, and Finnish is almost completely phonetic, every letter is nearly always pronounced the same way
…yea, almost… nearly… there are hundreds of rules, and they all seem to have at least one exception. You just have to be born (and live) here to see it’s really a logical and easy language.
I’m indifferent to them, sometimes like and sometimes dislike them, could pass, could take them or leave them, don’t care about them, don’t mind them, don’t notice them, never choose them but usually eat them, only like them fixed just so, like them occasionally or sometimes or once in a while or from time to time or now and then or once in a blue moon. I don’t despise or hate or loathe or dread or avoid or eschew or resent them, but neither do I crave or hunger for or want or desire or have a yen for or pine for them. I have mixed feelings, run hot and cold, vascillate, equivocate, or am undecided about them.
English is particularly flexible in some ways - it has an awful lots of open categories of words and very few closed. Not declining nouns for gender also makes neologisms and borrowings much easier. However, it’s also inefficient in other ways.
I wouldn’t have thought ‘time taken to say something’ was an issue unless you live somewhere where the dialect is particularly slow-spoken. I love subtitling people from the Southern US states because I never have to worry about trying to fit their words into the a readable time.
Are your acquaintances talking to other EFL/ESL speakers, or to native speakers?
Of course. But that’s not the way we talk. Not in the same converstion where someone says “I love aspasagus” We need the one word verb. How many people actually hate mayo. But it has become fashionable to say one does.
Indifferent might work, but most of yours are negative expressions modified by “don’t”.
Who really hates rap music?
I agree with Shagnasty that English is very efficient. This same efficiency renders it less flexible at times, IMHO. Lack of different words for different genders, for one, is a problem (although I think French and Spanish overdo it). Another is the fact that a pronoun is almost always required in a sentence where a noun has been omitted. In Spanish, for example, once it has been established who I am talking about I can omit the pronoun as the verb conjugation will indicate who the subject is. “Hablo” in Spanish translates as “I talk”. Points to Spanish.
Of course, this means that Spanish has an insane number of verb conjugations. Points to English.
And while English just steals, buys and cajole words from other languages, Spanish is slower to react. And if English needs a specific verb, it can make it up on the spot (To google, to Fedex). That is not possible in Spanish. Points to English
Spanish has the advantage that it is a phonetic language. Each letter has a specific sound, once you have learned how a letter or a consonant-vowel combination sounds you know how to read it, always. Learning how to read and write in Spanish is a pretty uncomplicated process. Spanish is also very poor, phonetically speaking, so only a few sounds to learn. Points to Spanish on that.
This. Any language we do not understand, or understand very little of, sound too fast, as the words get blurred together. We barely know where one ends and the other starts.
