About DEFINITIONS here (and the propositional value vs. pragmatic value of language):
When you state that it takes longer in English to “say anything” you really need to be clear on what “anything” means.
And how exactly do you measure thoughts and ideas quantitatively? Any given notion of a “complete idea” is going to be wrought with cultural preconceptions that are essentially arbitrary. Don’t you remember the airhead English teacher you had in middle school who said that in order to express a complete idea you always have to have a subject and a verb in a sentence? (After all “sentence” is an arbitrary notion itself.) But imagine there are two strange rooms, and you walk into one (A), which has two strangers. One says to the other “Could you come over here, please?” You go into the other room (B), likewise with two new strangers, and one says to the other, “Come here.” Is the utterance in (A) less “efficient” simply because it’s longer?
No, because both utterances are communicating more than the propositional value of the imperative—they convey the CONTEXT of the utterances, too: the relationship between the interlocutors, their purposes, the time and place of the interaction. One language might seem very “inefficient” in some contexts—situations where it hasn’t culturally developed, and very “efficient” in others, where it has. Generally, in speech, a language will tend to evolve to the greatest degree of “efficiency” possible grammatically and phonologically, while maintaining the level of pragmatics its speakers need. Likewise, to say that English “lacks nuance” because of some morphological or syntactic quality of some other languages you know seems pretty simplistic, to me. One must wonder, for example, how many languages can convey so much with the attributive use of prepositions as can English (e.g., I’m over that now or She’s in on the secret.)
So this is a question of PERCEPTION. You can ‘t really make a generalization about a whole language by comparing it to some translations into the few other languages you know—especially if all you’re comparing is syntax or lexicon.
This idea that the speakers of such-and-such language speak “so fast” is usually just the perception of syllable-timed languages (Spanish, Japanese, etc.) by speakers of a stress-timed language such as English. The fact is that English speakers at moments must—by the very nature of their language—speed up the enunciation of unstressed syllables to the point that non-native speakers can barely perceive them. The rate of enunciation of native English is constantly changing in fits and starts.
Yes, we do. You guys, you all, etc.
One could just as easily say that’s a reflection of flexibility—some languages don’t even bother with it. Or they just don’t accomplish the same thing morphologically. In any case, you can’t really say whether it’s “flexible/efficient” or not. In the end, any language will rise to the occasion and find ways to communicate what its discourse community needs.
