[ExI] What's the fastest language to speak?

Isabelle Hakala ismirth at gmail.com
Mon Oct 17 17:35:19 UTC 2011


Ok... this doesn't fit with your limitations, but ASL is the fastest
communication I know of for common ideas. If you are trying to teach someone
something they have never seen before it is NOT ideal, but for conveying a
story, etc it is quick, direct, poetic, emotional, and removes all
unnecessary words:) I have said many times that I feel everyone in the US
should learn ASL. If it were manditory starting in elementary school there
would be no reason to exclude the Deaf, everyone could sign  in noisy clubs,
wouldn't disturb others at the symphony by whispering, and would be able to
tell an entire story in 1/10th the time. It is incredibly efficient.

On Oct 17, 2011 9:17 AM, "Eugen Leitl" <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 04:44:13PM +0100, BillK wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 4:31 PM, Eugen Leit...
German wouldn't be even on the map. I was thinking of Italian or (Cuban)
Spanish,
but apparently, Japanese (counterintuitively) is pretty good.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html

Thursday, Sep. 08, 2011
Slow Down! Why Some Languages Sound So Fast
By Jeffrey Kluger

Here's one of the least interesting paragraphs you've ever read: "Last night
I opened the front door to let the cat out. It was such a beautiful night
that I wandered down to the garden to get a breath of fresh air. Then I
heard a click as the door closed behind me."

O.K., it becomes a little less eye-glazing after that, with the speaker
getting arrested while trying to force the door back open. Still, we ain't
talking Noël Coward here. All the same, this perfectly ordinary passage and
a few others like it are part of an intriguing study just published in the
journal Language — a study that answers one of the longest-standing
questions about human speech. (Read why speaking more than one language may
delay Alzheimer's.)

It's an almost universal truth that any language you don't understand sounds
like it's being spoken at 200 m.p.h. — a storm of alien syllables almost
impossible to tease apart. That, we tell ourselves, is simply because the
words make no sense to us. Surely our spoken English sounds just as fast to
a native speaker of Urdu. And yet it's equally true that some languages seem
to zip by faster than others. Spanish blows the doors off French; Japanese
leaves German in the dust — or at least that's how they sound.

But how could that be? The dialogue in movies translated from English to
Spanish doesn't whiz by in half the original time after all, which is what
it should if the same lines were being spoken at double time. Similarly,
Spanish films don't take four hours to unspool when they're translated into
French. Somewhere among all the languages must be a great equalizer that
keeps us conveying information at the same rate even if the speed limits
vary from tongue to tongue.

To investigate this puzzle, researchers from the Université de Lyon
recruited 59 male and female volunteers who were native speakers of one of
seven common languages — English, French, German, Italian, Japanese,
Mandarin and Spanish — and one not so common one: Vietnamese. All of them
were instructed to read 20 different texts, including the one about the
house cat and the locked door, into a recorder. All of the volunteers read
all 20 passages in their native languages. Any silences that lasted longer
than 150 milliseconds were edited out, but the recordings were left
otherwise untouched. (Read about the death of a language.)

The investigators next counted all of the syllables in each of the
recordings and further analyzed how much meaning was packed into each of
those syllables. A single-syllable word like bliss, for example, is rich
with meaning — signifying not ordinary happiness but a particularly serene
and rapturous kind. The single-syllable word to is less information-dense.
And a single syllable like the short i sound, as in the word jubilee, has no
independent meaning at all.

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together
to arrive at two critical values for each language: the average information
density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken
per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language
for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists
to be very information-dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more
data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be
spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high
information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables
per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken
slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63,
ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon
of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84,
thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of,
say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or
less identical amounts of information.

"A tradeoff is operating between a syllable-based average information
density and the rate of transmission of syllables," the researchers wrote.
"A dense language will make use of fewer speech chunks than a sparser
language for a given amount of semantic information." In other words, your
ears aren't deceiving you: Spaniards really do sprint and Chinese really do
stroll, but they will tell you the same story in the same span of time.

None of that, of course, makes the skull-cracking business of trying to
learn a new language any easier. It does, however, serve as one more
reminder that beneath all of the differences that separate Tagalog from
Thai, from Norwegian, from Wolof, from any one of the world's 6,800 other
languages, lie some very simple, very common rules. The DNA of speech — like
our actual DNA — makes us a lot closer to one another than we think.

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