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

Amon Zero amon at doctrinezero.com
Mon Oct 17 15:19:44 UTC 2011


On 17 October 2011 15:58, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com>wrote:

> iency
> Hey just a bizarre question I thought I would pose to the list since there
> are several polyglots on the list. In your opinion, what language is the
> most information dense and fastest to speak. For example if you lined up
> fluent speakers in all the languages of the globe and had them read and
> memorize a page of text; then gave the speakers lets say sixty seconds of
> air time on a telephone, how much of the gist and detail of the page of text
> could the various language speakers reveal in 60 seconds?
>


This is almost certainly a highly naiive response, given that I'm not a
fluent speaker of Japanese, but back when I did nstudy Japanese I was
impressed by the fact that it almost seemed to have been designed by a
computer programmer for purposes of optimal modularity, as opposed to the
more-exceptions-than-rules nature than makes English English notoriously
hard to learn.

For example, the single phoneme "no" means "is owned by" or "belongs to". I
wouldn't be at all surprised if such efficiency led to high information
density.

- A
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