Actually, it has more to say about the efficiency of the legal system, particularly with regard to copyright law, and human nature.
(James Cooke Brown, who invented loglan in the 50’s got into legal wrangles with other researchers who parted ways with him in 1988, and founded the “competing” Logical Language Group which produced lojban. Brown, who died recently, wanted to keep tight reins on his intellectual property, though one wonders about the feasibility of copyrighting a language - he seems to have been a bit of a control freak. Another court case in 1992 determined that the name “loglan” was a generic term, rather than a JCB-owned trademark, and the Logical Language Group has been saying things like “Lojban - A Realization of Loglan” ever since. Most of the relevent work seems to be going on under the Logical Language Group banner now.)
No, not at all along with semaphore, Morse code and smoke signals. Those are codes. Semaphore and Morse code represent written language, letter by letter; smoke signals represent spoken language one phrase at a time, and can only communicate an extremely small number of possible utterances. Sign languages - there are many - are not a code at all. They are everything spoken languages are, except spoken.
A linguist’s view on the original question: You can’t measure “efficiency” in a language. For any pair of languages you care to compare, you can find concepts that can be expressed concisely in the first but not the second, and concepts that can be expressed concisely in the second but not the first. The question is inherently unanswerable.
Assuming what I’ve been taught (that 90%+) of communication is nonverbal, I would assume ASL would be the most efficient language. Either that or some form of ESP/
Not embittered, just pointing out that if Chinese had used the same ideograms and pronunciation, it would be considerably better than it is now.
There’s two types of lingual associations that can be made, and three things those associations can be between. The two associations are concrete and abstract, and the three things are the actual idea or object, the written representation of that thing, and the spoken representation of that thing. - Ideally you would want the printed symbol for anything to resemble the object it represents, as well as represent the sounds in the name of the object itself. That way, you wouldn’t need to be taught it: you would know what the “word” was by what it looked like, and even if it was a word for an unknown object you would still know how to pronounce it, because the “word” would also represent properly the sounds of the name of the object. As a consequence of this system, you’d also have only one word for any object, and only one pronunciation.
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Chinese script started out as a graphic representation of the object (a concrete link), but allowed different pronunciations (an abstract link). When they went to brush stroke, they lost much of the original written resemblence to the subject, and so lost the only concrete link they had. So (if I am understanding correctly) Chinese has no concrete link between the way any symbol appears and what it actually represents, or what it represents and how it is pronounced, or how it is pronounced and the way it apears printed.
-On the other hand, alphabetic languages allow an abstract link between the object and both the spoken and written forms, but link the pronounciation with the written form all the time. -And that’s lots better than nuthin’. I can, for instance, hear an unknown (to me) German word, and I can look it up all by myself in a German-to-English dictionary to find out what it means.
-Alphabetic languages are also easier to make typewriters for, a consequence of this modern world.
-And I can be lazy and impatient, but they screwed the language up like a zillion years ago and they’re just now getting around to fixing it bit by bit. Sheesh! <;) - MC
I would like to add a few thoughts that stuck my mind when thinking about this.
I think defining a language as efficient if it is possible to express complicated conceptions in very short time is pretty vague since talking speed can vary very much among native speakers of an idiom.
The how-many-characters-for-a-concept definition is vague too; Chinese can express a word in one character, but drawing that character on a sheet of paper requires time, since they consist of many lines. Besides, the input of Chinese characters to a computer is not easy, so under this point of view, written Chinese is very inefficient.
I checked my Guinness Book Of Records (1989 German edition). It says in southern Argentina, there is a dialect called Fuego that expresses the idea “to look around hoping to find someone who offers you to do something both would like to do, but do not feel like doing” as “mamihlapinatapai”.
Which language is most efficient depends on how you define efficiency.
There is certainly a kind of efficiency with a pictographic language like Chinese, one symbol per word, and a kind of inefficiency because so many symbols are needed. An idea central to information theory, which deals with measuring the quantity of information conveyed in a message, is that information conveyed is proportional to the amount of uncertainty that is resolved. So each new character in written text eliminates some choices, narrows the infinity of possible universes unfolding, so to speak. And when you get to the last letter in “elephant”, since you already have a pretty good idea where the word is heading, little uncertainty is resolved and little additional information conveyed. Any comparison of language efficiencies must consider these issues.
When comparing languages that use the same alphabet, or nearly the same alphabet, such as European languages, the space taken up in writing something is a useful measure of efficiency. Generally English does well here, and is probably the most efficient common language by this measure. It is helpful that the English vocabulary is the largest, perhaps a million words depending on who’s counting. In terms of resolving uncertainty per information theory, the fact that more random jumbles of letters happen to form real words in English than in other languages (a necessary consequence of the large vocabulary) implies that a few letters of English rules out more possibilities, resolves more uncertainty, and hence conveys more information than a few letters in another language.