What's the fastest language in the world?

That said, nobody speaks Ithkuil fluently enough to test this so maybe I'll be proven wrong some day!

So? It's not about LLMs?

I'm quite sure this isn't true, since I can listen to even fast English speakers at 2X speed and still understand them. Although that's right up against my limit, presuming the speaker is already on the fast side of normal.

I would say, rather, that the bottleneck is the human ability to synthesize and speak the message they intend to convey.

nuvola, nuage, clowde

> There’s a technical meaning devised by a guy named Claude Shannon that involves, basically, how quickly a listener can reduce their uncertainty about the message they’re getting. This involves calculations of the number of possible syllables in a language, the relative popularity of each of those syllables, and the probability that a certain syllable will follow another. All the Shannon stuff is kind of abstract and involves a lot of math that, frankly, made my head hurt.

Japanese and Mongolian grammar has many syrprising similarities to Turkish (all those languages are unrelated as far as anyone knows). "I was made to read it repeatedly" can be one word, a verb with the right suffixes.

The Indo-European languages with their irrgular suffixes and inflections are actually unusual. Many languages have no irregular verbs, for example. Most that have irregular verbs, only have a couple. For some inexplicable reason, many Indo-European languages have dozens and dozens. This is a major outlier.

Turkish is in figure 1; its blob is on the lower end.

> developed over the years for efficient military communication purposes

A crude statement of this view would be pseudohistory. It’s common enough for registers of language to develop (and even diverge) in particular social circumstances, and so it wouldn’t be wholly surprising of a military register of Turkish were to have emerged. But there have been lots of other influences on the historical development of Turkish: for example, Arabic and Persian influence, especially in literary Ottoman Turkish; the natural evolution of the vernacular during the Ottoman period; and language reform under the Türk Dil Kurumu to remove Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Any plausible claim of this kind would have to be about the relative influence of military registers.

It’s also not obvious whether the needs of military communication would be particularly different from e.g. industrial communication, or whether that would prioritise speed over e.g. accuracy gained from redundancy.

Thus it's not surprising that all languages have evolved to about the same speed. None is "better". They all convey information at the same rate. That's why there is no pressure to speak just "the best one".

Like you, to my ear, American English seems to be spoken at different rates regionally. I don't know how to think about that...

I tried learning Danish. It's not like French where you don't speak the ends of many words. There, you just say only the most important syllables in the sentence, usually "deh" or "leh" (which are pronounced the same). Respect the Danes! Their language is impenetrable!

We can think of a language like a digital modulation, with the set of sounds being a symbol constellation, and the syllable time, as the baud rate. When you do such numbers, most (all?) languages fall in a fairly narrow window (something like 30 - 50 bits of actual information per second at average speaking speed).

If a language has fewer possible sounds, the syllables come more quickly. This is an innate tradeoff with a communication channel in information theory.

But the analogy is only partial because, unlike most designed protocols, the symbol distribution is not a normal or random distribution. And human language has, in information theory terms, internal redundancy and compression (pronouns do a table lookup) as well as error correction codes and checksums (most combinations are illegal).

This makes a analogy beteeen spoken language and a modem less than straightforward, though they are governed by the same underlying laws.

  …The paper found that, in terms of sheer number of syllables spoken per second, the fastest languages of the 17 studied were Japanese, Spanish, and Basque. The slowest were Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Thai.
  …
  What Pellegrino found is that, essentially, all languages convey information at roughly the same speed when all the factors are taken into account: around 39 bits per second. The higher the syllable-per-second rate, the lower the information density, which creates a trade-off that makes all languages around the same in terms of information rate.