# What language says the most with the least? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 4, 2000, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977 "2000-12-04T18:26:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Malice](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/278dde/32.png) [@Malice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malice)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/1 "2000-12-04T18:26:38Z")
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). ---
**Author:** ![SuaSponte](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/67e7ee/32.png) [@SuaSponte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SuaSponte)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/2 "2000-12-04T18:44:27Z")
Pig Latin. Sua ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/3 "2000-12-04T18:48:28Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![FloChi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/58956e/32.png) [@FloChi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FloChi)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/4 "2000-12-04T19:01:55Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Spritle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5daacb/32.png) [@Spritle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spritle)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/5 "2000-12-04T19:08:32Z")
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. handily, Spritle ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/6 "2000-12-04T19:13:06Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![muppetsoup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/aca169/32.png) [@muppetsoup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muppetsoup)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/7 "2000-12-04T19:24:00Z")
[Chicken](http://www.plif.com/archive/wc072.gif) ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/8 "2000-12-04T19:28:29Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. 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. ---
**Author:** ![barbitu8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/839c29/32.png) [@barbitu8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/barbitu8)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/9 "2000-12-04T19:36:24Z")
Poetry. ---
**Author:** ![barstow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/90db22/32.png) [@barstow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/barstow)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/10 "2000-12-04T19:37:56Z")
Hawaiian has the fewest sounds. The local joke is there are only 12 letters and 10 are vowels. ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/11 "2000-12-04T19:42:16Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Arken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dfb087/32.png) [@Arken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arken)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/12 "2000-12-04T19:54:13Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/13 "2000-12-04T19:57:27Z")
> [@](#): > > Hawaiian has the fewest sounds. The local joke is there are only 12 letters and 10 are vowels. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/14 "2000-12-04T19:59:03Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Chas.E](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e99b99/32.png) [@Chas.E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chas.E)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/15 "2000-12-04T20:19:32Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![jmullaney](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/85e7bf/32.png) [@jmullaney](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jmullaney)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/16 "2000-12-04T20:20:54Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Anthracite \* > 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. 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! ☹ My bet is on **Yiddish**. ---
**Author:** ![Inky\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/7feea3/32.png) [@Inky\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inky_1)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/17 "2000-12-04T20:32:58Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Turpentine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecd19e/32.png) [@Turpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Turpentine)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/18 "2000-12-04T20:38:19Z")
I thought it was Newspeak. ---
**Author:** ![Arken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dfb087/32.png) [@Arken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arken)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/19 "2000-12-04T20:46:01Z")
Turpentine said: > [@](#): > > I thought it was Newspeak. Well you were doubleplus wrong then, weren’t you? 😉 ---
**Author:** ![wolfman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/a8b319/32.png) [@wolfman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfman)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2000, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977/20 "2000-12-04T20:52:14Z")
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.\*\* [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-says-the-most-with-the-least/43977.md?page=2)