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

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Wed Oct 19 11:45:43 UTC 2011


On 17 October 2011 23:42, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> (and besides, ideographic characters are cheating :-)

Are they? As mentioned, in fast-reading contexts Japanese outperform
western competitors.

Apparently, the extra time spent to identify the Kanji concerned is
not so long as that required to go through the entire (or partial, in
Hebrew and Arabic and western stenography) phonetic representation of
a word. So, this could legitimately described as a broader-band
solution. Moreover, this might limit the inclination by the reader to
waste time subvocalising what he reads - but here I really have no
idea.

OTOH, it is undeniably a longer and more painful process to learn how
to read at any speed.

As to the intrinsic "compactness" of the language irrespective of the
visual or oral medium I still think that the endurance of formulaic
Latin is eloquent as to its  conciseness. "Video meliora, peiora
sequor" ("I understand that better options may be available, but
nevertheless I usually end up adopting inferior ones").

-- 
Stefano Vaj



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