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

[Stefano Vaj]

On 17 October 2011 18:16, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> 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
>

That is very interesting.

I like languages, and have a (at least passive and/or rudimentary) knowledge
of Italian, French, English, Latin, Ancient Greek, German, Spanish,
Portuguese, Catalan, Bulgarian and Japanese.

Understanding spoken language is invariably the most difficult task for me
(at least in my case first comes reading, then writing, then speaking, then
understanding what people say, even though I understand that especially for
women or non-visual men the process may be different), and while watching
movies on disks even in languages I know passably well I often resort to
undertitles to allow myself to go at the x1,5 speed afforded by my
Playstation III without losing information.

In terms of informational density, I still think that Latin would qualify,
given that even translating a foreign text in Latin in most circumstances
takes fewer lines than the original, and the opposite is invariably true.
The time necessary to understand the Latin text, even for somebody who knows
the language well - I could not say for a mother tongue, since I have never
met one in flesh and bones... :-) - may however be longer.

OTOH, Japanese utterances are even more concise, but for spoken Japanese the
presence of so many homophones makes people take things from afar, offering
a context first ("Speaking of the weather, it is not what we should like,
rain could come, therefore we risk getting wet") , or repeat again and again
the same concept in different fashions unless the meaning intended is clear,
in order to avoid ambiguity.

Not so in written Japanese, where the use of Chinese ideograms ensure
monosemic writing, especially in legal jargon. And I understand that
Japanese and Korean students who undertake fast-reading courses and contexts
in their own respective languages beat average fast-reading westerners hands
down - off? on? I hate phrasal verbs. :-)

-- 
Stefano Vaj
 <http://int.ask.com/web?siteid=10000861&webqsrc=999&l=dis&q=%20>
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