"The World’s Most Efficient Languages" Topic

Just as fish presumably don't know they're wet, many English speakers don't know that the way their language works is just one of endless ways it could have come out. It's easy to think that what one's native language puts words to, and how, reflects the fundamentals of reality.

But languages are strikingly different in the level of detail they require a speaker to provide in order to put a sentence together. In English, for example, here's a simple sentence that comes to my mind for rather specific reasons related to having small children: "The father said ‘Come here!'" This statement specifies that there is a father, that he conducted the action of speaking in the past, and that he indicated the child should approach him at the location "here." What else would a language need to do?

Well, for a German speaker, more. In "Der Vater sagte ‘Komm her!'", although it just seems like a variation on the English sentence, more is happening. "Der," the word for "the," is a choice among other possibilities: It's the one used for masculine nouns only. If the sentence were about a mother, it would have to use the feminine die, or if about a girl, the neuter das (for reasons unnecessary to broach here!). The word for "said," sagte, is marked with a suffix for the third-person singular; if it were "you said," then it would be sagtest—in English, those forms don't vary in the past tense. Then, her for "here" means "to here": In German one must become what feels to an English speaker rather Shakespearean and say "hither" when that's what is meant. "Here" in the sense of just sitting "here" is a different word, hier.

This German sentence, then, requires you to pay more attention to the genders of people and things, to whether it's me, you, her, him, us, y'all, or them driving the action. It also requires specifying not just where someone is but whether that person is moving closer or farther away. German is, overall, busier than English, and yet Germans feel their way of putting things is as normal as English speakers feel their way is.

link

As someone who is a native bilingual (French and English), I always found it interesting how the transmission of ideas vary by the language used. I remember a conversation I had with my mother over a campfire about the "strangeness" of French words for office supplies. She was complaining that because of linguistic paranoia, the Quebec government would invent new words when there was a perfectly usable and shorter English word in existence – why re-invent the wheel? I pondered about it for a few seconds, and it struck me. Many of those words – not just those created by the Office québécois de la langue française are self-descriptive tend to explain what the object is doing, such that often if you don't know what it looks like, you have a vague idea what it does. To be quite honest, I like the poetic flair it gives the French language, but to each their own.

that's my 2 cents
Cheers,
Martin from Canada

Speaking for myself as an American English speaker.
I "studied" Latin, French and German, for a maximum of 3 school years each. Then, never having the need to use them, they sort of faded away.

One thing I noticed was that the Latin was very economical. One word could be translated by up to 5 English words. But you had to know what you were doing, or the Monty Python "Romanes eunt domum!" scenario reared it's ugly head.

Then I noticed that while watching French language movies, that the speakers didn't really give a hoot if foreigners could understand them. Like Flashman's Apaches, the French were the worst mutterers.

Germans, on the other hand e-nun-ci-ated every single syllable, as if desperate that foreigners could understand them. Then they ruined it with their odd (to me!) sentence structure. ("Hold on, Englishman. The verb will be along shortly!")

And yet, the Romans understood each other quite well. As did the French and Germans.

With the ability to model the Towers of Hanoi solution in one short line, LISP has gotta be in the list of efficient languages.

Martin, but seriously, we have three major European language groups – Gothic, Latin and Slav (gee, I'm even overlooking Celtic). Say Good Morning in German, Dutch and English and you get to see why English is in the Gothic family. But as a three year old in any culture is reasonably fluent in the local language(s), and we are all smarter than a three year old so …. No, the point is that any language is adequate, easy and consistent for the native speaker but may create issues when dealing with new concepts or other languages.

One of the problems with any grammar/pronunciation is that languages evolve through usage or non-usage and absorption of neighboring language constructs and words and pronunciations (look at the variations in US, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand English brought about through adoption of indigenous names). The Slavic word for 'town' (originally a fortified village) was GOROD (eg town of Nizhny Novgorod), which became shortened to GRAD (eg., Stalingrad) and in some such as Czech, GRAD became HRAD (eg., Praha Hrad). But don't worry, the Gothic languages also have that G->(gutteral)H transition (g in German is pronounced as a G whereas in the Nederlands, G is pronounced as a gutteral H).

English is losing the ability to discriminate/differentiate friends and family from everyone else and now 'you/your' is all encompassing. I Thee Wed (wow, a Subject Object Verb Construct) has been replaced by I Wed You. Most languages still maintain the more personal/less-personal pronouns and adjectives (Eg., in French, J t'aime and Je Vous aime ).

Germans, on the other hand e-nun-ci-ated every single syllable, as if desperate that foreigners could understand them. Then they ruined it with their odd (to me!) sentence structure. ("Hold on, Englishman. The verb will be along shortly!")

Huh? Are you sure you are not conflating German and Latin?
In German the verb is usually where it is in English. In Latin the verb is at the end.

"I love you."
"Ich leibe Dich"
"Te amo"

The examples in Martin's link bear that out.

And yes, Latin is much more concise as the object of the sentence is implied by the verb. Ugh …….declensions.