I just got back from my honeymoon in France and Spain where I was exposed to numerous languages from all over Europe. I noticed that on numerous occasions an idea expressed in few words in English took many more words and/or syllables to convey the same message in, for example, French.
While no doubt the reverse is also true, it got me wondering:
What is the most “efficient” spoken language?
Is there a spoken language that conveys more meaning in fewer phonemes or morphemes than any other?
Is there a language that conveys less meaning in a given string of sounds than any other (speech used by politicians excepted).
I was of the opinion that among “common” languages, that is, not obscure ones, it would be Latin (not Pig Latin, shame on you Sua!). Every time I see a Latin phrase translated to English it seems that so many more English words and syllables are required to express the same thought.
Well it sort of depends. I do know that patents people like writing stuff in German. They write one sentence in German whereas it would take at least a paragraph to describe the same thing (and all its permutations) in English. It is because they string words together (occasionally with verbs) and the order of the words denotes signifigance, etc.
But it still sounds like a mouthful when spoken.
Perhaps Finnish (maybe it is just because they don’t talk?)
And Latin is rarely spoken anymore, so it wouldn’t have mattered too much.
I’m voting for either Turkish (is that the one where the verbs aren’t conjugated, just modified with words like “tomorrow” or “Yesterday”?) or good Sign Language (either ASL or one of the international varieties). After years of study, I’ve always been impressed with how much is conveyed with so little movement.
Of course, this goes out of the boundaries set by OP.
Perhaps Chinese. Compare some translations of the Tao Te Ching, especially the Shambhala edition that includes the original Chinese text, and you’ll see what a large amount of English verbiage is necessary to translate a few extremely elliptical Chinese characters.
That’s rather interesting - people that translate software always seem to comment that German takes up the most real estate on the screen. An aggravating factor is that because of the long words, word breaks tend to be awkwardly displayed.
Certainly, if you take product manuals which have been translated into multiple languages, the English presentation often seems to be the most compact, at least with reference to languages using the Roman alphabet. How much of that is a function of the original text having been done in English and having been translated into the others, I don’t know. It does seem that the German translation tends to take more room than the French, English or Spanish.
In terms of written language, I will certainly agree with this. You gain some visual compaction by having thousands of symbols. Any phonetic system is probably going to have to expand a bit visually over ideograms.
I might go for Chinese or one of the Southeast Asian languages for most compact spoken form as well, because those languages are tonal. Adding tonality should allow you to compact a bit more information per unit time into the spoken word, other factors being equal - just a WAG.
There was an invented language called ‘Allnoun’ which (big surprise) is all nouns. All other verbiage is expressed very simply with punctuation. It’s extremely efficient. I don’t have a URL for it, but I know there are a couple of websites out there.
18 phonemes, IIRC, and repeated vowel sounds. Which tends to make utterances run long - fewer combinations of phonemes for short words.
If we want to get strange:
How about Loglan? The low phoneme count reminded me of it. The radically wierd (but logical) grammatical architecture of Loglan, and the idea of reserving the “short word” space for operator words seems to make it very compact, in spite of a very minimal phoneme set.
Spritle, Turkish verbs are in fact conjugated for person, number, tense, and mood. Turkish does this through agglutination, which means sticking the pieces that do the grammatical work onto the end of the word, without changing the base word.
You may be thinking of isolating languages, which do not change the morphology of words. Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, Chinese are examples of languages that work like that.
Let me suggest a different measure of “efficiency.” Linguists sometimes measure a language’s “redundancy.” This is a technical measurement of how much unnecessary fluff is used in a language. Allow me to demonstrate. Here is a sentence with low redundancy (let’s assume it is a real language).
f u cn rd ths, u ar prbly a lnguist.
And now the higher redundancy version:
If you can read this, you are probably a linguist.
The first version contains fewer redundant elements. In the second version, more redundant letters support the correct decoding of the word. If there are any elements in the words that can be eliminated without reducing comprehension, these elements are considered redundant. A “redundancy ratio” is a measure of the effiency of a language, on an abstract level.
Anyway, linguists have measured each language for the average redundancy, but alas, I don’t remember where I saw the list of each language. I recall that English is sorta in the middle of the pack. Maybe some professional linguist can enlighten us with more redundancy info. Either that, or perhaps we could consult someone from the Department of Redundancy Department.
Probably because the Latin phrases that have stuck around already porvay more with less. There’s a good latin phrase for this logical flaw, but I can’t recall what it is!
I have to go with Chinese too because there are many different complicated inflections that can be used with each word.
As I understand it the inflections are catagorized as hot, cold, acending, decending and still (and I think there’s one more) and each sentance takes additional meaning from any one or a combination of them.
I’d have to say computer languages are by far the most commpact in written form. Various groups of people have spoken representations for the symbols that are very efficient too, but there is no standardization.
ie. ** n>1? a=2: a=3 **
vs** If n is greater than 1, then set ‘a’ to 2. If it is not, then set ‘a’ to 3.**
