The World's Most Efficient Languages (2016)
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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; ...
Banana makes it obvious that it's not official and on which two places it is connected together.
it does mean.. "paying attention to different things in life". Culture and language are ying-and-yan, either one shapes the other. Like, when same word means very different things, vs when there are plenty of words/constructs for some nuances that might be hard-to-differ for a foreigner. Whether the former means "we dont care about that", or just the opposite, "we do know that so well that it is obvious", i dont know..
My English comprehension level is comparable to native speakers, so it's not because I'm missing any jokes. This is not to say I don't enjoy comedy in English, in fact, I seem to enjoy it as much as anyone else.
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.
It has connotations of heroism.
I don't know exactly what the connotation is, but it's real.
P.S. The better past tense is slew, not slayed.
I do find it an odd (but probably not wrong) word to use for a bombing murder, but the rest seem not at all strange to me.
The words pork, beef, mutton, battle, fraternity, justice, elevate are all French, and were used by the Norman aristocracy after 1066. They all connote sophistication and nobility. The words swine, cow, sheep, fight, brother, right, lift are all Anglo-Saxon, and were used by the powerless peasants after 1066. They all connote earthiness and familiarity.
There is a fun podcast "The History of English" that covers a lot of this stuff. If liked the OP, you'll like the podcast.
Beef is derived from boeuf. Beefsteak is English. Biftek is French and derived from beefsteak. So the French word is derived from English which was, in turn, French.
A quick search shows that the etymology of steak seems to be Norse. So we have a good old mishmash here. Anyway, the important point is that England invented the beefsteak and exported the concept to France. However they do seem to have accepted the baton and done a pretty good job with it ever since.
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. :)
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.
English is quite varied; takes similarly to eliding subjects, at times.
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.
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".
"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.
Now, I don't generally have to worry about gender (per se) in most of my nouns but it is bloody hard remembering whether a table is masculine (DE) or feminine (FR, IT).
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.
https://lithub.com/on-living-and-thinking-in-two-languages-a...
Is it possible that your decision to ‘eat’ becomes independent from the impetus and a goal of its own? To the point where you’re now preparing food to ‘eat’ rather then to precisely address the sensation/discomfort that led you to that decision to begin with?
In other words, is it possible that languages that allow you to more or less precisely describe/categorize something effect how we think about them and ultimately act in response?
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.)
No wonder some Russians are attracted to the conlang...
Give me Toki Gonna though!
(Roman Jakobson, I think)
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.
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.
Is fairly common in daily life.
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.
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.
EDIT: I think English would be least compressible. But I suspect that all written languages would compress quite a bit.
I did find "Clustering by Compression", https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0312044
The emphasis in this paper was not on "efficiency", but rather on phylogenetic grouping. The authors used the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", which apparently has 52 translations as the subject text. See Fig 13 and section 5.2 for details. Instead of just compressing and normalizing, they developed a normalized compression distance, which involves concatenating two texts, compression, and division by the largest of the two texts, as compressed alone.
I think that using the same encoding of all the languages and some kind of normalizing would wash the results of differences due to encodings.
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.
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.
It's been generally done, just by determining how many syllables are necessary to express an idea; it also turns out to be pretty easy to measure IIRC, because people express ideas at a constant rate across cultures, so if you speak a less efficient language, you speak faster, and if you speak a more efficient language, you speak slower.
Romance languages aren't very efficient; English is pretty efficient, and again IIRC, the most efficient common language is Vietnamese, which can express ideas in about 2/3 of the verbiage that English needs.
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Search+for+the+Perfect+Langu...
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.
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.
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”.
https://code.fb.com/ai-research/unsupervised-machine-transla...
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.
"Sorry, Charlie. Starkist doesn't want tuna with good taste, they want tuna that tastes good."
For instance, Khwe has five past tense time distinctions that are grammatically encoded in verbal suffixes:
/-hã/: the recent and immediate past
/-tà/: the morning of the day of the utterance
/-ǁ'òm̀/: a "remote past" before today
/-tĩ/: another "remote past", for a few days or weeks ago
/-hĩ/: a "far remote past", used to refer to things that happened years ago or even in mythical times.
The example you give seems complicated, but this is actually mostly a matter of lexicon rather than grammar: it is an accident of English's history that "taste" can be a noun meaning 'aesthetic preference' and it can also be a verb meaning 'having a flavor'. The two noun-phrases in that sentence are "tuna with good taste" (a noun with a prepositional modifier) and "tuna that tastes good" (a noun with a restrictive relative clause modifier). Riau Indonesian definitely has relative clauses, and I think it also must allow modification of nouns by prepositional phrases, so the only interesting difference between English and Riau Indonesian for this sentence would be the fact that "taste" would (most likely) no longer be the same word in the two phrases.
> the only interesting difference between English and Riau Indonesian for this sentence would be the fact that "taste" would (most likely) no longer be the same word in the two phrases.
Which is I guess my point: puns don't usually translate. So is the underlying reality changed? (I used to wonder about this briefly at times when I was studying Russian in college.)
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 :)
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?]