What is the most efficient language in the world?

[gangleri2001]

Japanese because it's the fastest of the five languages I speak (spanish, English, Fijian, hawaiian, and Japanese) and one of the two that I speak fluently

Hey! Could you teach me hawaiian?

 

[Civfan333]

Maybe, I can speak it a little... But why do you want to learn that language? I find it highly ineffiecient as in it takes forever to say something. 1-ekahi 1-one
1-uno 1-dua 1 ichi

 

[Mr_Fusty]

Well, just a few thoughts -

1) Native speakers opinion's don't count for much. This holds particulary true for English speakers. This is mainly due to the fact that easyness to learn for foreign speakers is nessary for a lingua francua.

2) An international language needs some native speakers. I don't believe that any parents soley communicate with their children in Esperanto.

3) The language needs to have kept up with the times. Latin is just too out of date - thousands of words need to be created.

4) The language needs to have a wide geographic locale of it's speakers, either native or not. Mandarin, although spoken by at least 850 million Chinese, are nearly all concentrated in China itself.

5) The language needs to have several living relatives. Japanese does not - it is a language isolate. People, as a rule find it easier to learn languages in their same family than outside.

You may be thinking : - but bear with me. An efficient language is one which can impart any infomation, from the latest scientlfic discoveries to the inane chatterings of teenage girls. It needs to be easy to learn, in both forms, and the writing needs to be as simple as possible, and use as little charaters as possible. And when you speak this language, you need to be communicating with as many people as possible, and as many different types of person as possible.

 

[Gooblah]

Well..

English does fit the bill for most of your points. In fact, all. 26 characters is pretty good. Yes, I am a native speaker, but I'm also fluent in French and Telugu, a Dravidian language.

 

[Kyriakos]

Already greek words dominate the technical languages of any field, and also the humanities. In a sense they have become universal, and have been for some time, first due to the expansion of the hellenistic world, and then due to western european creation of new greek terms precicely to keep with the times

 

[Arwon]

You may be thinking : - but bear with me. An efficient language is one which can impart any infomation, from the latest scientlfic discoveries to the inane chatterings of teenage girls. It needs to be easy to learn, in both forms, and the writing needs to be as simple as possible, and use as little charaters as possible. And when you speak this language, you need to be communicating with as many people as possible, and as many different types of person as possible.

I agree with everything except "as few characters as possible".

What is ideal is a one to one relationship between written characters and phonemes. If a language has 44 phonemes it should ideally have 44 characters, not less.

 

[scherbchen]

I agree with everything except "as few characters as possible".

What is ideal is a one to one relationship between written characters and phonemes. If a language has 44 phonemes it should ideally have 44 characters, not less.

then again... having as few phonemes as possible might make a language simple and effective. like - standard - quechua. only /i,e,a/ as vocalic phonemes and no voiced plosives (granted, that is about as much as I know about the language and its dialects).

But I agree, to a certain extent. We should all switch to phonetic spelling. If that is the one I am thinking about, keep mixing those up. The one that adhers to a standard pronounciation (like RP for english). English would benefit from it and most languages (like Spanish) won´t notice it. Throw in archphonemes (archifonemas, no clue what the English term is) for a kick if you want to.

 

[BirraImperial]

English should be the chosen language, it's already widely spoken, its very versatile, and all new tech advances have English terminology. Besides, I find that English grammar is the easiest to learn.

 

[Civfan333]

but for a foreign born speaker, it's one of the hardest to learn

 

[Arwon]

English phoenmic spelling breaks down with the vowels. Anything Americans or English folk came up with would not reflect my spoken English and I'll be damned if you people are gonna tell me you're more correct than I am.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Well..

English does fit the bill for most of your points. In fact, all. 26 characters is pretty good. Yes, I am a native speaker, but I'm also fluent in French and Telugu, a Dravidian language.

You're Dravidian? Or just spent time on Ceylon?

 

[Dai Linn]

I'm not sure, but I'm thinking that Chinese and Japanese, especially writing-wise are likely two of the most efficient languages. I think that of the languages I know, anyway, Japanese is the most efficient. Hard to get used to if you originally speak a western language, maybe, but I find it very easy, logical, and quick in comparison to the other languages I know or am learning. Not that there aren't things in it that are a pain, but I think every language has that...

 

[Civfan333]

NO!!! Japanese is definately one of the LEAST effective writing forms

 

[nihilistic]

I'm not sure, but I'm thinking that Chinese and Japanese, especially writing-wise are likely two of the most efficient languages. I think that of the languages I know, anyway, Japanese is the most efficient. Hard to get used to if you originally speak a western language, maybe, but I find it very easy, logical, and quick in comparison to the other languages I know or am learning. Not that there aren't things in it that are a pain, but I think every language has that...

Well, no. Two things wrong with your claims.

1. They are both horribly inefficient. Sure, they are more descriptive and more 'high-context', meaning that less characters are needed to describe any particular item. But that by definition comes at a cost of requiring a lot more symbols for a complete language. It's basic information theory. The higher the compression ratio the more information the decompression program needs to store.

2. In no metric is Japanese more efficient than Chinese. They both inherit the Chinese pictograph-style writing that makes . .. .. .. . unnecessarily difficult, but Japanese grammar is more complex. Chinese is 'easier' than Japanese by default because Japanese has all the complexities attributed to Chinese, but Chinese lacks (at least) one complexity of Japanese: complex conjugation rules. If you see some Asian person talking in English with the tenses all wrong, chances are that he/she is Chinese. There are no tenses or singular/plural or complex conjugation rules in Chinese.

 

[Eli]

I would be willing to learn from scratch any language, if the rest of the world does the same and starts using in their daily lives.

That said, I think English is the obvious choice. Science, technology and business are already adapted to it, so it would be stupid to switch now.

 

[kramerfan86]

I'm not sure, but I'm thinking that Chinese and Japanese, especially writing-wise are likely two of the most efficient languages. I think that of the languages I know, anyway, Japanese is the most efficient. Hard to get used to if you originally speak a western language, maybe, but I find it very easy, logical, and quick in comparison to the other languages I know or am learning. Not that there aren't things in it that are a pain, but I think every language has that...

Are you kidding me? In the technological world how do you suggest a language with hundreds of characters is more efficient? I dont know enough about either to make proclamation about speaking efficiency, but writing wise claiming hundreds of characters is more efficient then under a hundred is illogical.

 

[Godwynn]

Number of characters in Chinese (1994): 85,568

From wiki, I'll pass on learning that language.

Nor do I want to draw

instead of writing out 'tortoise'.

 

[Bill3000]

Already greek words dominate the technical languages of any field, and also the humanities. In a sense they have become universal, and have been for some time, first due to the expansion of the hellenistic world, and then due to western european creation of new greek terms precicely to keep with the times

It would have to be ancient greek, then. Modern greek is awful as a language and alphabet. I mean, for god's sake, you require two characters to make the /b/ phoneme.

 

[Dann]

Number of characters in Chinese (1994): 85,568

From wiki, I'll pass on learning that language.

Nor do I want to draw

instead of writing out 'tortoise'.

But... but... it already screams 'tortoise', even to those who don't know the language.

Just look at it. There's the head, legs, the shell, tail...

 

[Enkidu Warrior]

Japanese and Chinese both have very efficient writing systems that are constantly dumped on by people with little understanding of them.

I would write tortoise like this: 亀 which has 11 distinct strokes, which is exactly the same as the number of distinct strokes in 'tortoise'.