I don’t know about that. When I’m comparing speed, I’m listening to syllables. And syllables in Spanish seem quite a bit closer to each other than English. French seems slow to me, as does German IIRC.
Television is a good source for comparison.
Spanish is ridiculously more wordy and uses way more syllables to say the same thing than English. A big part of the reason for this is that there are only 5 vowel sounds in Spanish while there are (I think) 13 in English, so we can have a lot more 1- and 2-syllable words. Case in point: the word for “too” (as in, “too much”) in Spanish is demasiado - that’s 5 freakin’ syllables! The reason they seem to speak fast in Spanish is because the words are so god damn long that they have to speak fast to say the same thing, and it still takes them longer.
I have a theory that all languages are equally complex; they just put their complexity in different places. 
I remember hearing quite a bit about Business Eaglish back in, I think, the 70s and or 80s but I haven’t heard a thing lately. Is it still being taught, and is it in use now?
An observation, FWIW - according to the theory of isochrony, English is a stress-timed spoken language. That is, the language is spoken so that the stressed syllables come along at about the same rate, which results in syllables in between being crammed into a shorter or longer space depending how many there are. Other languages (such as Spanish) can be syllable timed, so that individual syllables all come at the same rate.
The effect of this may be, to non-native English speakers, a sense of discomfort or waste as they occasionally cram syllables in to keep the rhythm of the language right. The “machine-gun” speech of syllable timed language might seem subjectively more rapid without actually being so. English, to people used to Spanish, might seem uneven, therefore slow, even if in truth it is no slower in communicating any connected string of ideas than any other language.
So in other words you don’t have any relevant knowledge, since the ability to come up with lots of ways of expressing a similar meaning but giving it slightly different nuances is something that comes from having true fluency in a language, not being “conversant” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) or being able to read a language.
What’s the evidence for this assertion? I would think it would be obvious that no clear way to measure this exists, since it’s hard to decide what constitutes a word in any language. How many times does it have to be used? In what circumstances? What counts as a word? Is glycylisoleucylalanylleucylphenylalanylserylglycylglycyltaurine a word? Because ‘words’ like that show up in publications. Is “Autobahn”? How many people have to know the word for it to count? A few moments of thought should have led you to realize that it’s silly to make statements about the size of a language’s vocabulary as though it were something that could be measured with any meaningful degree of precision.
But other languages do that too. Japanese has more Chinese, Indian and English words than one could shake a stick at.
Attention all personnel, Code Blue. PMS patient room six-six-six.
Like I said, I am not a linguists expert but I did study under them in my PhD behavioral science program at Dartmouth. I studied with the direct academic descendants of Noam Chomsky. A lot of that field wasn’t of special interest to me but I learned a lot from them and I am just conveying the impressions I got from it.
It sounds like you are the one that needs to read about it more. The questions you raise are pretty basic and should be easy to get up to speed on. I can send you some title if you want a start. English has a lot going for it especially the large vocabulary but also a really flexible sentence structure and easily understandable pidgin forms that can freely mix with other languages. People always think wait, there has to be a better one out there because English has some pretty terrible flaws like poor choices for gender neutral pronouns. That is true but I ask anyone to nominate a better language for overall efficiency and flexibility and to defend that choice. Go ahead, make yours.
I thought of this thread as I was waiting in line to order lunch today. I was standing behind a woman who seemed to talk a mile a minute and never stopped. I wasn’t even trying to comprehend what she was saying and it still made my head spin, and she was speaking perfect English.
Crank don’t count. 
I’ll remember this in the future if I find myself teaching a student who graduated from Dartmouth. It’s always good to learn about the quality of academic institutions.
Congratulations. That’s, well, very unremarkable. What percentage of serious people who study linguistics do you imagine haven’t studied under someone who studied under Chomsky? It can’t be a very high number.
Impressions that, sadly, can be dismissed with only a moment’s thought.
I’d love to see what you consider to be a valid citation that supports your erroneous assertions. I’m always up for a laugh.
Apparently the linguistics program at Dartmouth is taught by faculty that don’t even know what the word “pidgin” refers to!
Well, I don’t have your experience studying under behavioral scientists at Dartmouth, so perhaps I’m outclassed here! But yes, I would love to read whatever papers you find that attempt to quantify the “efficiency” of language. Because, surprisingly, I can’t seem to find any. It’s almost as though actual academics – outside of Dartmouth, obviously – tend to focus on things that can be studied and measured objectively, rather than vague personal impressions – even those of people so talented that they once were conversant in Spanish.
This board is supposed to be lighthearted and serve as a middle-man between the unwashed masses and true academia. Linguists is a well-defined academic field with thousands of books and papers that frankly always bored the piss out of me at the finest level of detail. I did like to hear what people that know what they are talking about have to say on the subject at a bar though and I am just passing it on here in message board form. That is all it is. If you really want to get into this stuff deeply, it requires graduate courses and this isn’t an accredited university.
My main point is that English is very flexible and useful as a world language for many reasons. I also see people make the assumption that because English is not perfect, there most be a better one out there when I don’t think that there is. Pitting every other language collectively against English isn’t a fair match. If someone knows a more efficient language overall then tell us what it is and why. I would love to learn about it in all seriousness.
Well, perhaps people like you who are members of the unwashed masses should bask in your opportunity to learn things from people who know things, rather than aggressively promoting your ignorance. I looked up, and the banner said that this place is about “fighting ignorance”. Unless of course I mis-parsed it, and the theme of this place is that ignorance the thing doing the fighting – as your posts suggest.
How odd, then, that you found yourself not only answering a question about linguistics, but also trying to support your nonsensical assertions by appealing to the singularly deep study you did of it (at Dartmouth, no less!) on the subject.
Perhaps you should leave the insights of your barfly friends at the bar, though, and assume that the person asking this question wanted an actual answer. And seeing as you are not capable of contributing to that effort, perhaps you should sit on the sidelines and wait for a question you actually can contribute to without coming across as embarrassingly ignorant to anyone who has any familiarity with the subject.
I’m new here. The rules here seem to suggest a focus on evidence and understanding. I may be wrong – perhaps the sort of nonsense you posted in this thread is acceptable here. Perhaps the Straight Dope is the Dartmouth of the internet. I don’t know. I just like to step in when people are saying things that are incorrect, as you did, in hopes that others don’t read confidently stated nonsense and assume the author who speaks with such assurance actually knows what he is talking about.
Wait, what? I was informed that I was on the tenure track here!
The fact that this isn’t a university shouldn’t be taken as license to simply spout bullshit (to employ a philosophical term of art – please indulge my excessively academic tone). At least not unless there’s some public acknowledgement that people who have absolutely no knowledge on a topic, and lack even the basic intellectual skills to perform simple reasoning about it, are free to post and take the same tone of authority as those who can actually understand the topic. If that’s the rule here, why would anyone bother asking a question? You could get the answer of someone who understands the topic of conversation, but far more likely, you’re going to end up with the responses of someone who went to Dartmouth.
None of the reasons you offered, however, stand up to the slightest scrutiny. How unfortunate.
I wasn’t aware that we were attempting to settle on a single perfect human language. But then, I wasn’t even aware that such a thing could be accomplished through legitimate scientific research.
I would humbly suggest that you track down each of your professors at Dartmouth, and kick them in their gonads. Because if you managed to obtain a Ph.D. and are somehow nonetheless under the impression that there is some sort of useful, defensible, objective answer to the question of which language is the best, then you were woefully underserved by your education. The question makes about as much sense as asking a biologist which species is the best.
I’m still interested in the list of citations you offered, though. A lot of nonsense does manage to make it into legitimate journals, and it’s always fun to read it and laugh about it.
Must
Pound
Somebody
Into
Mindless
Submission
Sheesh, guys!
I’m hoping more for mindful submission, actually.
I would have to say that (modern) English is very concise. All the stuff I buy has instructions in multiple languages (usually french, spanish, portuguese, and german). In all cases, the english sections are shorter and contain fewer polysyllabic words.
I take this as an indication that english is both efficient (says things with a minimal word count) and concise (a sentence structure that conveys information directly).
And don’t get we started on Navaho (600 tenses for verbs), or the Inuit dialects (hundreds of words for snow).
Maybe I misunderstood something, but I think this was covered in Intro to Linguistics: there are no “superior” languages. A lay person may come up with all sorts of ideas about it that are usually meant to make themselves feel better about their native language–note that both of the people mentioned in the OP are not native English speakers–but at the end of the day, no language is truly “better” than another.
Your language is an expression of how you think and most people recognize that, if only subconsciously. To imply that one language is “better” (or more efficient) than another is to imply one people are “better” (or more efficient) than another. It’s a classic “look at me, I’m so evolved!” claim that should make anyone who has seriously studied linguistics cringe.
English is English. It serves its purpose. It may be different than other languages–and those differences may bother people from another cultural background who are used to communicating their own way–but it works for English speakers.
And there are not hundreds of words for snow in any Inuit language.
One thing English is definitely not good at, compared to other Germanic languages, are compound words, due to influence from French. It’s just impossible to construct words the way it can be done in other languages.
That is a UL. According to a linguist I heard, when asked about it, there is no way to decide which language has the largest number of words.
Well, one “who is a teacher, was born in the US” I would think is about as “native” as any of us.
And the OP asks, in a very friendly manner, “Is English inefficient?” Then goes on to clarify that we’re talking about spoken English.
I didn’t actually see much in the whole thread that claimed that any language is better than any other. At least not in a way implied in the post I’m replying to.
Yeah. WTF is up with the vitriol on this thread?