Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erde. 10
En el principio Dios creó los cielos y la tierra. 18
Au commencement Dieu créa les cieux et la terre. 19
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 17
This is hardly scientific, but as you can see English is the longest sentence, and both French and Spanish have more vowels. It's just things I notice when I read.
Also, I may have counted some incorrectly.
It's obvious that Germanic languages have more consonants than Romance languages, it's common knowledge.
But I really really don't believe your claim that English would be longer than German, or than most Romance languages for that matter. I have translated a lot of texts between English, German and Romanian, and the English version is
always the shortest, the Romanian one in the middle, and the German one the longest. In fact (again only from my experience), English has by far the most words with only one syllable out of all the languages I know.
Your sentence is also not relevant because of the very different phrase structure - if you worded your English sentence the way the German one is built, you'd get:
At beginning created god heaven and earth.
Which is a lot shorter than most versions you've mentioned.
Well although it may not be readily apparent, English's habit of pronouncing <ce> and <ci> as /sV/ is exclusively borrowed in terms of etymology. The only words in which <c> is pronounced as /s/ are latinate; English has historically had its own form of palatalization, but with a result akin to Italian's or Romanian's: that is, the Protogermanic kinni (chin) turns to cin in old English and now is <chin> /tʃɪn/. The rule being that Prototgermanic words begining in ki or ke will palatalize their first consonant to /tʃ/ (chin, child chest and many others). Obviously the orthography has changed to the new spelling, and most English speakers would pronounce <c> followed by a front vowel as /s/ in any given made-up word as in the French way, instead of as /tʃ/, the traditional English way. It just goes to show how deeply French has penetrated the language!
Interesting, again I had no idea!
So historically English actually shares a sound change with my native language (well, one is certainly an understatement, but still - one that I thought to be mostly specific to Romance languages).
Also in vulgar Latin <oe> would palatalize the preceding consonant, but of course, <oe> and <ae> would be pronounced as /e/ anyway, thus bringing into Latin those long strings of pretentious pseudo-archaic spellings like <coelum> instead of <caelum> or <celum> (all pronounced as /tʃelum/) and of course the pathetic "foetus" spelling which somehow has survived to some dialects of English.
(Reason #54703 that USamerican spelling is superior.
)
Ah, forgot about the <oe>! Right...
When compared to Germanic languages, Romantic languages will always come up with more need for vowels mainly because their respective phonologies just can't handle the diverse consonant clusters of German, or even English. Hence when Spanish borrows the English "scanner" it comes out in Spanish as "escáner"; Spanish speakers can't pronounce an initial /sk/ so they throw in an extra vowel to simplify it, thus wasting another syllable. Other Romance languages allow for /sk/, but all in all are FAR more conservative than German in terms cluster allowances. There is typically a correlation between the variety of consonant clusters a language contains and the language's brevity. Granted their phonological rules aren't as constrict as Japanese; Japanese, without clusters at all (well CVn), ends up restricting learners of English to quite laughable speech: "Ai dontu sapiku Ingariju!!!!"
That makes an awful lot of sense!
In any case, Germanic languages are not the "best" in this regard, not even among IE languages. Slavic languages have even more consonant clusters, and allow for syllabic consonants, which can lead to sentences like "Strč prst skrz krk". Whereas among European languages, Romance ones are at the opposite of the spectrum (with Romanian being probably the one with the highest vowel/consonant ratio, thanks to the extreme diphtongization of open Latin vowels - as a result of which, one can even find sentences made up entirely of vowels - for ex. "oaia aia e a ei, eu i-o iau").
I don't understand that part. Can you give some example?
He did, above (the word "chin" for example). His point was that the palatization which took place in English was from "ci" to "chi" and from "ce" to "che", not to "si/se", but because of the French influence on the language, when reading a new word that contains those characters, an English speaker is much more likely to read it "si/se" rather than "chi/che", which is the way it would have become, had it followed all the changes specific to the evolution of the English language.
