What spoken language is the most verbally compact?

What spoken human language (natural or artificial) is the most verbally compact? - by this I mean, in which language can you mean the most while speaking the least?

For the purposes of this thread, let’s say we’re comparing a notional set of everyday phrases, requests and statements; the kind of things that people would have to say while obtaining food, asking for assistance, manufacturing objects collaboratively, trading etc.

-It doesn’t matter if the language is compact at the expense of being difficult to learn; it still counts. Neither does it matter if it achieves brevity by having a broader choice of phonemes or other vocal components; it still counts.

So what human language is most economical in terms of the typical volume of spoken sounds necessary to express common concepts?

Hmm, I’ve never seen this taken to actual verbal speech, but I know that English is one of the most compact written languages. We have a lot of words; we can get ideas across with one or two words that take many more in other languages.

When I worked in translation, every language we translated into had an expansion factor. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but they were ratios like “If you’re translating from English to French, figure on a 30% space increase. English to German is 50%”

The percentages referred to additional space on the page needed to fit the wording.

Does it work the other way round, though? E.g. German to English requiring 33% less space? I suspect not.

I also worked in translation (for software), and yes, it does. I constructed multilingual websites for various clients, and not only did we have to allow for more complex sentence structures in non-English sites, we aso had to factor in the greater length of individual words to design menus and so on. E.g. “Services” is “Diensestlungen” in German; “About [company]” is “A propos de [company]” in French; “Get a quote” is “Solicitud de presupuesto” in Spanish.

However, written expression is not very useful to the OP, since entire concepts can be bound up with a single Chinese character or Kanji, but this doesn’t necessarily make the language more verbally compact.

That said, Asian languages that dispense with tenses, definite articles, and adjectival agreement might indeed be in the running.

The most compact language by far is body language. One can speak volumes with the lift of an eyebrow.

As Jjimm said, yes it does work both ways. Just curious - why would you suspect otherwise?

I guess I was thinking that a native-English speaking writer would use structures and concepts that are natural to English but not necessarily to other languages. Thinking of the recent thread about tenses in various languages - English doesn’t have a true future tense, for example, so we use wordier forms like “I am going to go”. So a document written by a native German speaker might use expressions that don’t translate neatly to English without wholesale rewriting.

Thanks for the answers so far. I asked the question because of a rather fanciful hypothesis (which I am happy to acknowledge as being silly) I had in mind a long time ago; it was that languages from far northern regions would be more clipped, gruff and compact, whereas languages from regions nearer the equator would be softer, more relaxed and redundant, because it’s harder to make yourself understood outdoors in the cold windy north, and in some cases it’s unpleasant to uncover your mouth for too long.

Could it also be that the tonal system in place in, say, Vietnamese allows a far greater number of monosyllabic words?

Japanese have a similar hypothesis for why the Northern Dialect is the way it is. But rather than saying that they cut words short and such, the dialect has a more “mumbled” sound to it. The idea being that it’s so cold, people don’t want to open their mouth enough to enunciate well.

Each pictogram (word) in Mandarin is a single syllable.

Okay, but how many syllables do you need to use to express everyday concepts, in comparison to, say, English?

Similar amounts, IMO. While each character is usually a word in itself, combinations of characters make up other words. In Cantonese, e.g. “beware” is made up of the words “small” and “heart” - “siu sum”. Sometimes more syllables than English: “if” is “yu gwo”. “When” is “geh do”.

The savings come with our verb construction. “Are you going to the island tomorrow?” (11 syllables) is expressed as “Tomorrow you go island?” (Ting-yat ley hoi do ah). (6 syllables - the “ah” is an inquisitive.)

Just a thought jjimm:

Could one reason for the lengthier translations be that many of the things being translated are English/American concepts to begin with? If I were to translate from English to Swedish, I’d have a hard time translating “on the QT” and keep the same meaning, while keeping it down to a total of seven letters. Especially when dealing with (Internet or) financial terms, were English have been the lingua franca for about two hundred years. The language where things originate get the prerogative of shaping the idea, the concept, the meme and when other languages try to catch up, they have to resort to lengthier constructions.
Compare with the excellent German word schadenfreude.

Hah. Someone should tell that to the Eskimos.

You make a good point. However, I just wanted to point out (nitpick?) that the total number of *letters *is completely irrelevant. For this exersize we should try to agree on whether we’re counting syllables or phonemes. Obviously if we’re talking orthography, one of the pictographic languages will win out (as already pointed out).

Another factor, though I don’t have any idea of its importance, might be whether the translator is a native speaker of one language translating to one learned later, or vice versa. I would guess that native speakers might have a vocabulary that is greater and more nuanced than that of someone who has learned a second language. If so, they might have to use several words to accurately express an idea from their first language in another. (Yes, I realize that many translators have been brought up in dual-language households, but I’d like to know if there’s any truth to the idea.)

All the 100+ translators we used were native-born native speakers as a requirement of the position. It was an interesting, multilingual and multicultural office (at one point the French translators complained that the German translators had taken over part of their office without asking).

In Thai the basic way to ask this would be bpai koh phroong mai? which is four syllables. There is of course a more proper way to ask this, but a lot of Thai is assumed or omitted based on the situation in spoken language, for example the above is more or less “go island tomorrow?” where the last word is an inquisitive like in Chinese. The you is inferred since you’re talking to the person, and frankly the word tomorrow would sometimes be omitted if they already knew that was the plan or just from a lack of precision. It’s also fairly simple written, although the tones are a bear for us poor folk not inculcated in them from an early age and they have more vowels than you can shake a stick at. On top of this the southern dialect which my wife speaks is mainly different in that it drops unecessary syllables for words. This manifests itself in our homelife where “the computer” has become “the pute” for instance.

So in that office all English>French translation would be done by a native speaker of French. But said native speakers of French would probably not also be native speakers of English, right?