
The World's Most Efficient Languages (2016) - Jtsummers
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/complex-languages/489389/
======
blattimwind
> But does this mean a different way of experiencing life?

What is noticeable, at least for me, is a different approach to naming things.
E.g. in German technical things are usually named by what they are or do
(descriptive), while in English many things are just named "randomly" after
e.g. people or who/where it was first used. Consider: Elastitizätsmodul vs.
Young's modulus; Steilkegel vs NMTB taper; Tellerfeder vs Belleville washer;
...

~~~
ape4
When programming, I name all my functions after myself ;)

~~~
NicoJuicy
This reminds me of someone who named all of his variables after vegetables...
I wouldn't want to inherit that product

~~~
dvh
Actually I use this in one particular case: in Android there is an event
callback "onActivityResult" and it's first parameter is integer. In all demos
online you see officially looking name like SDCARD_WRITE_PERMISSION and when
noobs copy paste it and try to compile it they can't find in which library it
is defined, so when in demo code I use BANANA it's little bit more obvious
that they have to define it yourself. But MY_SDCARD_WRITE_PERMISSION also
works.

Banana makes it obvious that it's not official and on which two places it is
connected together.

------
sublupo
> In a Native American language of California called Atsugewi (now extinct),
> if a tree was burned and we found the ashes in a creek afterward, we would
> have said that soot w’oqhputíc’tainto the creek. W’oqhputíc’ta is a
> conglomeration of bits that mean “it moved like dirt, in a falling fashion,
> into liquid, and for real.” In English, we would just say “flowed.”

I realized something like that in English when translating. The word "slay"
means, according to a basic dictionary, to kill (violently). But to an English
speaker it means much more. I wouldn't say that a school shooter slayed the
children, rather shot. The Boston bomber didn't slay the runners, but rather
bombed. I would consider slaying to be an act done by a sword. But, in the
case of a terrorist stabbing people, I would call that a stabbing, not
staying. I would say that slaying is only appropriate if the sword attack was
going across a body and not directly into, like with stabbing.

~~~
fasigonio
"Slay" is a funny word. I think of it mostly having a connotation of a _just_
person killing something _evil_. So I could slay a dragon, but not a chicken.

It has connotations of heroism.

~~~
Kirth
Chickens can be proper evil buggers. Slaying is júst the word you are looking
for.

~~~
rjplatte
"And lo, it was an evil chicken before my eyes. And as he was evil, I slew
him."

------
yongjik
The article briefly touches it but doesn't really expand on "the", which is
every bit as weird to outsiders as German genders or Karbadian "I mean it".

So, "the father" is something like "Not just any father, but a particular
father, and we can assume that we both know which particular father we're
talking about."

Next time anyone says "language X is so weird, they have an expression for Y!"
think about how to explain "the" to, say, speakers of Mandarin. :)

~~~
paraditedc
There are equivalent articles in Chinese.

a -> yige "一个"

the -> zhege "这个"/ nage "那个＂

And of course words like "my", "our" which are used in place of articles are
there as well.

You might not need the articles when the context is very clear (which causes
problems for Chinese speakers when they try to learn English), but the concept
is there. I believe it's the same in Japanese. Can't comment on other
languages though.

~~~
yongjik
I'm sure there are Chinese words that can serve the same purpose. The point is
that they aren't mandatory.

So, to an English learner coming from these languages, a sentence like "I was
cleaning attic and found book" is perfectly understandable. Exactly what attic
and what book we're talking about should be apparent from context.

On the other hand, in actual English, "I was cleaning the attic and found a
book" portrays a different picture from "I was cleaning an attic and found the
book." Use one when the other is warranted, and it sounds weird and confusing.

~~~
burfog
But then we have "I was cleaning house and found Kevin." too.

Both "a Kevin" and "the Kevin" would feel weird, especially "the Kevin". One
might do it on purpose as a sort of joke, implying that Kevin is an ordinary
inanimate object.

More oddness is that "cleaning up" doesn't involve an "up".

~~~
Declanomous
"You'll never guess who I saw?"

"Who?"

"Elvis"

"Elvis? _The_ Elvis or _a_ Elvis?"

" _The_ Elvis"

The doesn't imply someone is inanimate, it just means that they are a specific
one.

------
lazyant
There was a Reddit thread about something like this and some bilingual people
said the language they speak changes their personalities to a degree.

For example someone raised in a language - say French in France - and then
learnt English and moved to the US and finding than he is being more assertive
or direct when speaking English than when speaking his mother tongue.

~~~
cedex12
A more reasonable explanation than "languages influences personality" is just
the change of context. You speak different languages in different contexts.

~~~
bunderbunder
You do, but, when you're in a context where you're speaking a language, you're
also _thinking_ in that language. I wouldn't be surprised if that has an
influence on one's thought processes.

Concrete example: I have less of a tendency toward hyperbole when I'm speaking
my 2nd language. The reason why is simple: I don't know many hyperbolic idioms
in that language, so I lack the ability to express myself hyperbolically. But
I think it goes a step further: Lacking the vocabulary, I have a hard time
even having hyperbolic thoughts when I'm thinking in that language.

(That said, I don't want to suggest that this is somehow an aspect of the
language itself. It seems more likely that native speakers have about the same
range of expression as native speakers of any other language, and I'm just
lacking it because of my limited familiarity.)

------
willscott
No mention of Ithkuil, a conlang notable for attempting to maximize efficiency
of expressiveness.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil)

~~~
lgessler
Leibniz also dreamed of something similar:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis)

------
lgessler
More on Whorfianism and why it's (mostly) wrong, if this article piqued your
interest:
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/#Who](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/#Who)

------
rvense
"Languages differ, not in what they can express, but in what they must
express."

(Roman Jakobson, I think)

------
xte
IMVHO the most efficient language is the one all involved parties in a
communication speak, understand and can use to express as clearly as possible
anything they want.

So IMO German is the most efficient one for Germans native speaker's between
them, French for Frenches etc. The thing we really need is an international,
artificial language, as simple as possible for anyone in the world to be used
ONLY for docs and international communication alongside their native one to
avoid advantage a country above others.

------
baobrain
> Other languages occupy still other places on the linguistic axis of
> “busyness,” from prolix to laconic, and it’s surprising what a language can
> do without. In Mandarin Chinese, a way of saying “The father said ‘Come
> here!’” is “Fùqīn shuō ‘Guò lái zhè lǐ!’”

The writer seems to have copy pasted the phrase into Google translate. The
phrase ‘Guò lái zhè lǐ!’ is simply incorrect grammar in mandarin. I'm unsure
of how accurate the rest of the piece is.

~~~
kenhwang
For non-speakers, ‘Guò lái zhè lǐ!’ translates to "Come here to here", which
is definitely a bit awkward. Usually `Guò lái` is sufficient since "here" is
implied, similar to how you can simply say "come" in English.

------
zapzupnz
Something that hasn't been brought up yet is sign language.

In New Zealand Sign Language, the sign language that I know and use, it is
possible to reduce "go over to the other side of the room, pick up that
suitcase, and bring it back over here to me" down to simply pointing at the
suitcase, imitating picking the suitcase up by its handle, and then pointing
downwards in front of oneself, all whilst looking at the interlocutor,
possibly with eyebrows raised towards the end of the sentence.

To actually see it, it's a very efficient way to express not only a command
but what object is desired without having to actually name it, where it should
go, who should carry it out, and the eyebrows might imply that it is a
request.

That said, it can be cumbersome and inefficient in many use cases; I would
rather read English text when trying to quickly find a piece of information in
an article than rewind or fast-forward through a video of somebody signing the
article. In a real-time visual modality, though, it's very efficient.

------
peter303
McWhoter has fascinating podcast on Slate.com (sans the #$&*() Slate ads) All
a couple of great popular science books on language.

------
cryptonector
All languages are complex in some way or other.

Japanese is rather simple in many ways (e.g., number of sounds, syllabic
alphabets) but very complex in others (Kanji, counters, and so on).

Spanish too has few sounds, a Latin alphabet, simple accent rules, there's
generally only one way to write any word you hear pronounced... but it has
thousands of irregular verbs, four regular kinds of verb irregularities, and
irregularly irregular verbs.

English has more sounds, spelling is a mess, has no diacritical marks so you
just have to know how written words are to be pronounced, and has developed or
and imported hundreds of thousands of words, but its verb conjugation is
simpler than most every major European language.

A language without verb tenses can still express complex time relationships --
it's just done differently than in a language with verb tenses.

------
bediger4000
Seems to me that there's room for improvement in this article. For example,
the author does not try to compress any written language samples. If you
wanted to find a "most efficient" language, you'd compress samples, maybe
normalize them with the uncompressed length because it's hard to get the same
thing written in different languages. My guess would be that natural languages
would compress quite a bit, with English close to the least compressible.
Artificial languages like Ithkuil and FORTRAN would be much more compressible,
putting lie to Dembski's assertion that "natural" information is more likely
to be incompressible.

EDIT: I think English would be least compressible. But I suspect that all
written languages would compress quite a bit.

~~~
andreasvc
Why do you think English would be least compressible? Is that based on
conjecture or have you investigated this? Why would artificial language be
more compressible? That seems completely orthogonal to me (by definition, an
artificial language can be designed with whatever properties you choose).
Fortran may be more compressible due to its limited set of keywords, but it's
my impression that Ithkuil is by design more information dense and thus harder
to compress than English.

The most efficient language is the least compressible language only in a
narrow and arbitrary sense of efficient. There are many considerations such as
what is efficient for the speaker, the hearer, redundancy to noise, efficiency
with respect to particular purposes, etc. We can assume that natural languages
will generally make a good trade-off across these factors, and searching for
the most efficient language in one particular narrow sense is not very useful.
Moreover, compression of text focuses only on surface form, completely
ignoring the dimension of meaning.

~~~
bediger4000
I live in the USA. We get labels in English, French and Spanish so that
products can be sold in Canada and Mexico. The English labeling is almost
always visibly shorter than the French and Spanish. So I hypothesize that
English would compress less.

My conjecture is that artificial languages will be more compressible because
they haven't had time to get honed down, like English losing "thee" and
"thou", that personal mode of address. Esperanto and Loglan are completely
regular, which natural languages are not, and thus has a lot of use-cases
where the regularity doesn't matter - they haven't had time to lose the
mostly-unused features.

For better or for worse, compression of text only uses the surface form to
compress, because that's the level that compression works on - letters or
bytes or some other unit. You can't compress meaning. Meaning doesn't exist
per se: colorless dreams sleep furiously, after all. That is, you can use
perfectly sensible words and letters and even legitimate syntax, and still
create strings devoid of meaning. A document consisting of perfectly spelled
words, and legitimate syntax, yet without meaning like the colorless dreams
sentence, will compress identically to ordinary text with the same
orthographic and syntactical validity.

------
natmaka
Umberto Eco's "The Search for the Perfect Language" comes to mind

[https://www.wiley.com/en-
us/The+Search+for+the+Perfect+Langu...](https://www.wiley.com/en-
us/The+Search+for+the+Perfect+Language-p-9780631205104)

------
gerdesj
"Moreover, anyone who has sampled Chinese, or Persian, or Finnish, knows that
a language can get along just fine with the same word for “he” and “she.”"

English (at least in en_GB) can coerce _they_ into a gender neutral form of he
or she. Sometimes it will need a bit of sentence re-arrangement and other
tricks but will still be natural.

I was chatting to my aunt and they said: "Ooh, you are awful." My dad looked
at me and said "crack on". In the first sentence they is substituted directly
for she and in the second sentence he is dropped entirely from: "and he said".

I'm sure other languages have similar tricks. In this case I don't think it is
even breaking the rules.

~~~
zapzupnz
Depends on whose rules and to what extent those rules are being enforced.

I think 'they' as a gender-neutral pronoun is widely accepted in speech and
may have greater acceptance in writing than once it had thanks to modern
conceptions about inclusiveness in language, especially by those who
challenge/have challenged the notion of gender as a binary.

For me, that use of 'they' shall remain incorrect in writing (by virtue of
introducing ambiguity relating to number) except in reported speech and prose
that intends to invoke a casual, perhaps intimate, feeling in the reader; but
perfectly acceptable in speech itself.

That makes it different to the other languages where gendered pronouns don't
exist at all, or are so limited in actual use that they might as well not
exist.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I think 'they' as a gender-neutral pronoun is widely accepted in speech and
> may have greater acceptance in writing than once it had

Well, _less_ than it had before the Victorian effort to forcibly re-engineer
English in the image of Latin, but _more_ than it had at the height of
influence of that effort, whose influence is still waning.

> For me, that use of 'they' shall remain incorrect in writing (by virtue of
> introducing ambiguity relating to number)

The ambiguity of number ship pretty much sailed with “thou”.

------
visarga
What I find fascinating is that NLP tools today can learn to translate between
two languages even without a dictionary or a parallel corpus. That says
something about the relations that exists between languages.

[https://code.fb.com/ai-research/unsupervised-machine-
transla...](https://code.fb.com/ai-research/unsupervised-machine-translation-
a-novel-approach-to-provide-fast-accurate-translations-for-more-languages/)

~~~
balibebas
Try using that thing against Bahasa Indonesia, the fastest language I'm aware
of, and let's see how intelligent it really is.

~~~
jcagalawan
As a speaker of both Bahasa Indonesia and Mandarin, I'd say Mandarin is
faster.

------
mh-cx
Reminded me of analytic vs synthetic languages:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language)

------
dahfizz
This article made me wonder about not just the density of information in words
but time. Just as with compression with computers, you have to balance
compression ratio with the speed to compress and decompress. So a slightly
more verbose language might actually convey more information per unit time
because it's easier to understand and speak.

~~~
ralphc
This sounds a lot like what people say about computer code. Write it to be
understood, not to be "clever" with a minimum lines of code.

------
anon2775
0\. Take all concepts, modifiers and verbs

1\. Make a histogram of their usage

2\. Huffman encode them based on what sounds/inflections/etc. are easiest to
make and most distinct

3\. Add an ECC syllable to each word or phrase

4\. Set straightforward, simple semantic rules so that it's mechanical,
obvious and unambiguous

Relish in the glory of the next Esperanto.

------
sverige
How would this be translated into Riau?

"Sorry, Charlie. Starkist doesn't want tuna with good taste, they want tuna
that tastes good."

~~~
booleandilemma
It’s been an hour and no one’s provided a translation, so I’ll take a stab at
it:

 _Maaf, Charlie. Starkist enggak mau ikan tongkol yang canggih, tapi mau ikan
tongkol yang enak._

I’m not a native speaker so what I wrote above is probably riddled with
errors, but it won’t be long before a native speaker or someone with a
doctorate in the Riau dialect of Indonesian comes along and corrects it. This
is the Internet after all :)

~~~
inawarminister
Yeah this is not one of the Riauan dialect, it is in THE high prestige Riau-
Johor dialect that became Indonesian though.

In my everyday language, modern Jakartan: Sori Charlie, Starkist gak mau
tongkol yang dipilih-pilih, tapi tongkol enak aja.

[How do you translate with good taste?]

------
rashthedude
Linguistic relativity

