Latin can convey the same information as English in far fewer words in many (if not most) cases. Are there other languages that can convey information in fewer words than Latin?
Maybe it would be better to look at syllables, since one could just make a language where every sentence is just an extremely long word. So what language(s) are the most concise?
Possibly classical Chinese. I just finished a class in classical Chinese, and I was amazed how much information could be put out in a line of only four or five syllables. Then again I think that they made a point of making something as concise as could possible be.
Judging by electronics manuals I’ve seen in French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and various other languages, English is usually around 30-50% more efficient.
The Vietnamese folk I know claim their language to be very concise. I think they are right., and any tonal language like that would have good grounds to make that claim. If you have, say, five tones, then you have five times the number of possible monosyllabic words available to use.
I wonder if this is sometimes because the manual originated as an English document. Accurately translating a document often incurs an overhead (in order to preserve idiom etc.) that wouldn’t exist if the concepts in the document were expressed natively in the target language.
Over on the Nanowrimo site, someone mentioned that the Finnish equivalent of the 50,000-word mark would be around 30,000.
I don’t know about how concise it is, but Solresol allows you say two things at once, one spoken and one sung;
you can literally put both sides of an argument at once.