Correct: they were fluent in English but not native speakers. But they were also highly trained in the subject they were translating (software interfaces and help files mainly).
Latin is far more compact than English is, in written documents anyway. I could not vouch for how compact it is when spoken.
Well, we can compare bible sizes and if I remember correctly the King James version is about 20% shorter than the Russian synod bible.
My feeble guess, which will make **Karl Gauss ** angry: perhaps you should look towards highly agglutinative languages, which compress most of a sentence into a single word? The word ends up being long, but… well, take Swahili, where the verb picks up prefixes for the subject, tense, and object. It is an awfully sweet little grammar.
Not really. At least in my experience (having studied some Turkish and Georgian), while the number of words may be less, it’s more than made up for by the length of words, so there’s no net reduction of syllables (quite the opposite, in many cases, as various features of a verb such as person, number, and aspect, which can be expressed with one or two syllables in a synthetic language or are left unmarked in an analytic language, each have their own morpheme in an agglutinative language).
I would think the answer is Chinese. Every word is a single character.
Read the exchange above. (Almost) every single character is a word. Not the other way round.
Back to the actual subject, I have to agree with ShibbOleth in some east Asian languages that once the context is established, then it becomes even more succinct - “ley hoi do ah” - four syllables, opposed to the eight in “are you going to the island?” given the context.
You can’t reduce the translation under the assumption of context, and not reduce the sample phrase the same way, though.
Under the context of asking a question of the speaker, “Going to the island?” is only six syllables, and “You going?” is three. Assuming they were talking about going to the island in the first place, there is sufficient context to just ask, “You?”
Assuming context is tricky stuff.
if context is allowed, might not the english version be shortened to “you going?” - 3 syllables.
Why does this bring to mind a game for Whose Line is it, anyway?
I can see Ryan and Wayne doing a bunch of gestures and saying, “Eh?” over and over. Maybe even have Drew and the guest player doing a fake translation for it.
It is more natural in Asian languages. Your example in English is a little contrived and very casual. In Japanese, for instance, it is routine, even in less casual situations, to drop the subject.
And, a minor nitpick for Oregon sunshine: Chinese characters are logographs, not pictograms. Mayan hieroglyphics are pictograms; Chinese characters (and even Egyptian hieroglyphics) are not.
This assumes the context of the island too. In which case it becomes “ley hoi ah” or more likely, “hoi ah”, so still up to one syllable fewer. I can’t see “you” being terribly useful.
I don’t know, man…
My american Orgo teacher was Chinese. Yeah yeah, he’d been in the States for 15 years and was naturalized, he still spoke worse English than any of the just-off-the-boat foreign students. Apparently Chinese (or at least his version of it) only has one quantity adverb, at least from the way he spoke when trying to explain charge differentials.
Trying to follow his strings of “much much much much not” (strong negative charge differential) and “not much much much much” (tiny positive differential) was definitely not very compact to the ear, even if strictly speaking it involved less syllables. It’s one of those cases where the mental structures involved are so radically different that I wonder whether comparisons are really valid or we’re talking apples and drills.
Isn’t “You going?” two syllables? “Going” is a dyptong, at least the way I pronounce it… not GO-ING, but going. Or, rather, goin’.
I don’t think this is a valid comparison, as Latin (as well as other “dead” languages) simply doesn’t contain a lot of words required to communicate modern ideas. How do you translate “I need to install a new OS on my Mac because the hard drive died.” into the Latin?
Even if you disregard high-tech stuff, this still holds true. I found that out when I asked my Latin teacher what the Latin for “Penguin” was. (there is none. The Romans didn’t know penguins existed.)
Since Latin is not quite dead, there is a Latin word for “penguins”: “Spheniscidae”. (Latin is not quite dead, because new Latin words get coined every time new species of plants and animals are discovered).
It’s two syllables where I am, speaking the Queen’s English as it should be spoke.
Let me correct a common misconception regarding Chinese. Written Chinese was originally invented for or was constrained by the limitations of a pictographic language that was written originally on bones and then slats of bamboo. No bonus points for verbosity.
However, the OP is asking about spoken languages and not written. Spoken Chinese has a very common practice called di-syllabicizing or taking a one syllable word and making it two syllables long. Because Chinese is a tonal language, the spoken form generally adds a second syllable when one syllable would be fine in the written form. For example, in Chinese you generally say “let’s go out” when the spoken form would be “let’s go”. That’s because if you get the tone or context wrong, “let’s go” could have several meanings that are not readily apparent to the listener. However, if you say “let’s go out” then it is 100% clear.
Written chinese, especially classical, is somewhat akin to “telegraph English” when compared with Elizabethan novel style english. And both are quite different from the way people normally speak Chinese.
Does stating it this way make sense? Or if spoken, I would just say “get it?”
The amount of vocabulary available doesn’t have an effect of the compactness of the grammar. If anything, I would guess that less vocabulary causes longer, compound words to be used…
We have just as much of a future tense as German does, which is to say none. The formal way of forming a future statement in German is to use the auxiliary verb werden, which functions almost exactly like English “will” in that context. IIRC Germans use their composite future construction less than we do in English, and will use the simple present to mean the immediate future, more than we do. For instance they’ll say “Ich mache das”, literally translatable as “I do it”, but meaning “I’ll do it”.