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General Discussion & Feedback => Radio Show & Podcast Feedback => Topic started by: thedoc on 29/09/2015 19:49:37

Title: Is English the most efficient language?
Post by: thedoc on 29/09/2015 19:49:37

Is English the most efficient language?
Asked by Les

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[chapter podcast=1001163 track=15.09.29/Naked_Scientists_Show_15.09.29_1004133.mp3](https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenakedscientists.com%2FHTML%2Ftypo3conf%2Fext%2Fnaksci_podcast%2Fgnome-settings-sound.gif&hash=f2b0d108dc173aeaa367f8db2e2171bd)  ...or Listen to the Answer[/chapter] or [download as MP3] (http://nakeddiscovery.com/downloads/split_individual/15.09.29/Naked_Scientists_Show_15.09.29_1004133.mp3)

Title: None
Post by: Psyman on 21/11/2016 15:30:21

Actually, that's very incomplete. I speak 5 languages besides English and all of them have much more useless baggage and are thus less efficient. For example, French noun genders - what do you gain by knowing that farm is feminine? And yet you have to adjust adjectives to accommodate this, i.e. toutes les fermes. This adds a considerable cognitive load not to mention storage and paper when considering book publishing. Over hundreds of thousands of words in a book - you'll find many more pages are needed, unless you sacrifice precision and meaning. Furthermore the University of Lyon did a study in which they determined spoken English was about 10% more efficient than French and lead all the most popular languages in the world. See paper: http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_2011_Language.pdf
FIFY! ;-)