A lot of people who are familiar with multiple languages, or even just made a habit of comparing columns of text in different languages, will have noticed that some languages tend to be longer than others, i.e. they take more words/syllables/letters to express the same concepts. For example, ISTM that English is shorter than Spanish.
My question is how this impacts the speed at which people think, talk & read.
If two Spanish-speaking people have five minutes available for a conversation, do they say less to each other than to similar English people? Or do Spanish-speaking people talk faster than English-speakers, on average, to compensate?
Similarly, if someone is reading a book in Spanish, does it take longer than the same book in English, or does the guy read faster?
Or even if a person is alone with his/her thoughts, does an English-speaker think of more in the same time?
I would imagine there are two limitations on speed WRT these things. One is that a person can only think so quickly. The second is more technical - it takes time to express the sounds or recognize them if listening, or to recognize the letters and words. The question then is which one of these is what puts the upper bound on speaking/listening/reading/thinking speed for the most part? If it’s technical ability, then people who speak longer languages are likely limited by the same constraints. But if it’s thought process, then it’s likely that people who speak longer languages adjust their speed to conform to the same speed of thought process. (Thought may have a different equation, since thoughts are not as bound by technical constraints, and not all thought is expressed in language.)
But I have no actual knowledge about this, and wonder if any is out there.
That’s an interesting cite - thanks! - and may support the notion that speed is adjusted for length of language. From the cite
The abbreviations stand for “Mid Length of Utterances (in words)” & “Mid length of the dialogic turn”. I’m not completely clear on what these measure precisely, but they presumably correlate to how many words it takes to express a concept (since the length of an utterance and dialogic turn would be determined by how long it takes the speaker to get across whatever point they’re making). So if speed is inversely correlated to these measures, it would seem that speakers compensate for the amount of words it takes to express their ideas by adjusting their speaking speed.
Although it could possibly not be enough to completely offset the difference in language length.
A bit of a nitpick, but the difference is being exaggerated here by the fact that the English is a clipped version and the Spanish is not (leaving out the "to the"s but including the "por la"s).
But, I’ve often thought about this, or at least something similar. When I’m thinking about something, I usually have an intuitive grasp of the entire idea relatively fast (or at least, it seems I do), but then I still go through all the trouble of spelling it out, “talking” to myself (we all do this, right? right?)
With 10 plus years managing translations in probably well over 20 languages, I can chime in a bit here.
Yes, the length of a language as written varies with fairly well known and predictable distributions. this is true probably in syllables, number of characters, and number of strokes to write, and other measures too I would guess.
But the information content as communicated is dependent on completely unrelated maters. One place to look for wide variance would be between high context and low context languages - English being a good example of a low context language, where we are culturally attuned to explain everything and assume nothing, and Japanese being a good example of a low context language, where communication includes much much more non-verbal assumptions about what the other party gathers of your meaning.
Try to keep-up with Luis Moya in this video, Moya is a two-time WRC champion as co-pilot to Carlos Sainz – who, BTW, has the lowest crash-rate in the history of the WRC series.
And yes, in case you were left wondering that is some sort of “on speed” Spanish he’s speaking. Not that I understand much of it either
Also, I’m a speed reader. I don’t read word by word, but in chunks (ideally, line by line, but sometimes the text is too wide or isn’t formatted right). I started buying novels in English during college: at that point, I could read two normal-sized fantasy or scifi novels in Spanish in one train trip home (and two more on the way back) but needed both trips to go through one in English, thus buying them in English combined economy with practicing the language… by the time I finished college, my reading speed was the same in both languages. Note that I’m talking in terms of books-per-hour, not words per minute - as applies to the OP’s question. After all, often English uses three words to say what Spanish says in one.
