It is multiplexed with five tones and a variety of different registers to signify relationship, status, and variable interplay between the two based on situation.

• University Thai language learner, linguist, and professional Thai reading, writing, speaking in Thailand for several years

Looking at the two curves, it looks like they are pretty close but French edges out English because of the speed it's spoken at.

Even when it was fresh in my mind, I was never able to follow French tv because they just go so fast.

Both were massive empires. Makes sense that imperialism would put selective pressure on language. Historically you're either limited in words by space on a paper or what can be easily repeated by messengers.

I feel like the multitude of tenses in French help with being more precise.

I had the same feeling. I honestly just feel like English is a junk drawer of depth borrowing various languages, but maybe average speakers don't try to dig deep into it?

In most cases, being vague requires more informational transfer. To be vague but still connected to whatever is the signified, you need to give more information around the idea rather than simply stating the idea. Think about being vague about how you feel versus being blunt about it.

Yeah like "qu'est-ce que c'est ?" Which is just "what's that?" (I speak both too) would never have guessed French had more information encoded, french translations are always longer too (but you don't always pronounce all ofc).

Switch to Rust. I speak Rust btw.

This conjecture explains the results surprisingly well. If the original was written in French, which then got translated to English, which was then used as the basis of translation for the other languages that would explain the results entirely.

So I did a quick pass through the paper, and I think it's more or less bullshit. To clarify, I think the general conclusion (different languages have similar information densities) is probably fine. But the specific bits/s numbers for each language are pretty much garbage/meaningless.

First of all, speech rates is measured in number of canonical syllables, which is a) unfair to non-syllabic languages (e.g. (arguably) Japanese), b) favours (in terms of speech rate) languages that omit syllables a lot. (like you won't say "probably" in full, you would just say something like "prolly", which still counts as 3 syllables according to this paper).

And the way they calculate bits of information is by counting syllable bigrams, which is just.... dumb and ridiculous.

Actually fewer syllables per second is good, means you’re spending less effort speaking. It’s the ratio of information/syllables you want to maximize. Which means German/English/Mandarin/Vietnamese are roughly on par as the most “efficient” languages.

LMFAO PNY USB that's poetic

This is also why, to me, rapidly spoken natural Spanish and Japanese sound oddly similar if I hear it out of "the corner" of my ear, so to speak.

Which is funny cause I kinda speak Spanish lol

Is that a common question to be asked in Finland?

Traipse?

That's the full sentence asking if you want to run around aimlessly.

What makes you think that? I'm curious. I would've assumed something like Inuktitut (1 word conveys subject verb object tense ...) or something like toki pona (removes unused information) or maybe a highly analytical language like one of the Chinese languages.