5 ms·

The World’s Most Efficient Languages (2016)

38 points by anyonecancode 5y ago

ivolimmen 5y ago
Being a native Dutch person and using English a lot, I see some weird differences in these languages. In Dutch we have a weird (but nice) construct that we can make something smaller by using a postfix "tje". So in Dutch we can express "a small house" as "een klein huis" or "huisje" but it is also allowed to combine it as "een klein huisje". All are correct but have different nuances. You can not translate this into English. English does have several words for houses; like cottage that also convey other emotions linked to the word house but we have a broader spectrum of expressing emotion, in my humble opinion.
dang 5y ago
One past thread: The World's Most Efficient Languages (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18577061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18577061 - Dec 2018 (98 comments)
dahart 5y ago
My son discovered and has started learning Toki Pona, a constructed language designed for minimalism, much more ‘efficient’ than English, and extremely “telegraphic” to use the term in the article. I’m definitely intrigued, but not sure if I’d want to spend the energy to learn it. Anyone here have experience with Toki Pona? https://youtu.be/E4y7tf3VJAM https://youtu.be/E4y7tf3VJAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
- anonporridge 5y ago
  I've dabbled in Esperanto, which was designed to be a simple, nationally neutral language that everyone could learn as a second language for international communication, so no specific people would be favored with native language. Of course, it's still latin based, so it would still heavily favor people from Europe and the Americas. This one is still interesting in seeing how simple language can be, although you do notice how the grammatical consistency ends up sounding artificial, sterile, and sometimes awkward. Natural language probably evolved all of its irregularities to please our ears and tongues.
  - dahart 5y ago
    Ah, cool, I’ve never heard anyone speaking Esperanto. Looking up videos now… Do you think it’s achieving the goal of being an international alternative? Are there enough people learning Esperanto? That Toki Pona WP page mentions Esperanto takes 30-40 hours to reach beginner proficiency, while apparently Toki Pona takes ~30 hours to master. Maybe I should try them both, because 30 hours is nothing. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in German, thousands in Spanish, and can’t say much. 30 hours in most real languages doesn’t get you that much further than being able to say hello and where’s the bathroom comfortably.
    - Viliam1234 5y ago
      If you want to give Esperanto a try, here is a good website to learn it: https://lernu.net/ https://lernu.net/ Here is a collection of some music in Esperanto: https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/muziko.html https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/muziko.html
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      No. It's a cool experiment, but I would say the project as it was envisioned is mostly dead. It's well over 100 years old. However, there is still an interesting idea about teaching it to school children as a first second language, because it's so well structured and easy to pick up that kids can start actually using it very quickly. The idea is that it primes the brain to be ready for more than one language, which is the steepest part of the multilingual learning curve. There's an exponential decay to the challenge of learning the n+1 language. But what you're telling me about Toki Pona is that it might actually be better suited for that. If a classroom full of kids could be conversant in a second language after just a few weeks or months of instruction, that would achieve this goal much more efficiently.
    - inawarminister 5y ago
      There are many Esperanto communities around the net, podcasts, radios, zoom meetings etc. But I want to tell you about an alternative, Interlingua (IALA) which is a pan-romance conlang designed for "comprende a prima vista". I've been learning it for some time now, and while I progress in Spanish and Latin (using Lingua Latina per se illustrata to self study) the basis I hold from Interlingua really helped me in grokking the two linguas materne... And actually a Galician professor has been in the news for going viral on TikTok speaking and writing only Interlingua to the millions of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian speakers [0]. It's a fairly interesting language, and easy to grasp for English speakers I think since most of the Latinate spelling are really similar to English rendition of them (but pronounced regularly like Italian or Spanish). For Toki Pona, it's a really interesting language. I should dedicate some time to learn it... A minimal language that can endlessly be extended as long as your speaking partner understand your terms. That's an intriguing prospect. [0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/interlingua-tiktok/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/interlingua-tiktok/ [1] https://www.tiktok.com/discover/interlingua?lang=es https://www.tiktok.com/discover/interlingua?lang=es
- sterlind 5y ago
  I made it halfway through, a decade back. It's not usable for practical communication, but it's an interesting experiment in linguistically forcing a Zen mindset. For instance, "telo nasa" is alcohol, but it literally means "crazy water." "pona" means good, simple and beautiful, while "ike" means bad, evil, complex and ugly. There are no numbers besides 1 and 2, and no ways to embed clauses. Translating into Toki Pona is like describing the world to a 5-year old feral child. I recommend it.
anonporridge 5y ago
Related, I've often wondered whether people have categorized languages by how they change the way you think. While efficient communication of ideas is important, what seems just as if not more important to me is how the language allows a brain think. We think in our language, and there are tradeoffs between languages on the patterns of thought that are easy and that which are difficult. I'd rather learn a language that gives me a new model for thinking about the world more creatively, more collectively, or just in an entirely alien way that few people think like. And going a step further, it would be fascinating to experiment with constructing languages with the intention of building a kind of novel "brain firmware" that would help people think in ways no human ever has. I suppose programming languages are like that to some extent.
- jhanschoo 5y ago
  > Related, I've often wondered whether people have categorized languages by how they change the way you think. This probably has a lot to do with the society of speakers that you use your language with. For example, you use a very different register with very different thought patterns with your gangmates in your bad teenage years than with the client at your luxury sales job. There are concepts that will be simply be taboo to express to either speaker that would be natural conversation in the other. I really disagree that there are expressions that are impossible to express in language, barring that limitation. Either a circumlocution will give an approximation (including where the original is ambiguous), or an expression can be coined to be introduced to that language, the society of speakers willing.
- hoseja 5y ago
  I don't think everyone thinks "in language" all the time. I certainly find it much more efficient to think in abstract concepts and only compile them down to language when I need to communicate them.
mitchbob 5y ago
https://archive.md/BEQCk https://archive.md/BEQCk
ekam 5y ago
Relevant: https://www.gwern.net/Language https://www.gwern.net/Language

38 points by anyonecancode 5y ago

Being a native Dutch person and using English a lot, I see some weird differences in these languages. In Dutch we have a weird (but nice) construct that we can make something smaller by using a postfix "tje". So in Dutch we can express "a small house" as "een klein huis" or "huisje" but it is also allowed to combine it as "een klein huisje". All are correct but have different nuances. You can not translate this into English. English does have several words for houses; like cottage that also convey other emotions linked to the word house but we have a broader spectrum of expressing emotion, in my humble opinion.

dang 5y ago

One past thread: The World's Most Efficient Languages (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18577061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18577061 - Dec 2018 (98 comments)

dahart 5y ago

My son discovered and has started learning Toki Pona, a constructed language designed for minimalism, much more ‘efficient’ than English, and extremely “telegraphic” to use the term in the article. I’m definitely intrigued, but not sure if I’d want to spend the energy to learn it. Anyone here have experience with Toki Pona? https://youtu.be/E4y7tf3VJAM https://youtu.be/E4y7tf3VJAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

anonporridge 5y ago
I've dabbled in Esperanto, which was designed to be a simple, nationally neutral language that everyone could learn as a second language for international communication, so no specific people would be favored with native language. Of course, it's still latin based, so it would still heavily favor people from Europe and the Americas. This one is still interesting in seeing how simple language can be, although you do notice how the grammatical consistency ends up sounding artificial, sterile, and sometimes awkward. Natural language probably evolved all of its irregularities to please our ears and tongues.
- dahart 5y ago
  Ah, cool, I’ve never heard anyone speaking Esperanto. Looking up videos now… Do you think it’s achieving the goal of being an international alternative? Are there enough people learning Esperanto? That Toki Pona WP page mentions Esperanto takes 30-40 hours to reach beginner proficiency, while apparently Toki Pona takes ~30 hours to master. Maybe I should try them both, because 30 hours is nothing. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in German, thousands in Spanish, and can’t say much. 30 hours in most real languages doesn’t get you that much further than being able to say hello and where’s the bathroom comfortably.
  - Viliam1234 5y ago
    If you want to give Esperanto a try, here is a good website to learn it: https://lernu.net/ https://lernu.net/ Here is a collection of some music in Esperanto: https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/muziko.html https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/muziko.html
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    No. It's a cool experiment, but I would say the project as it was envisioned is mostly dead. It's well over 100 years old. However, there is still an interesting idea about teaching it to school children as a first second language, because it's so well structured and easy to pick up that kids can start actually using it very quickly. The idea is that it primes the brain to be ready for more than one language, which is the steepest part of the multilingual learning curve. There's an exponential decay to the challenge of learning the n+1 language. But what you're telling me about Toki Pona is that it might actually be better suited for that. If a classroom full of kids could be conversant in a second language after just a few weeks or months of instruction, that would achieve this goal much more efficiently.
  - inawarminister 5y ago
    There are many Esperanto communities around the net, podcasts, radios, zoom meetings etc. But I want to tell you about an alternative, Interlingua (IALA) which is a pan-romance conlang designed for "comprende a prima vista". I've been learning it for some time now, and while I progress in Spanish and Latin (using Lingua Latina per se illustrata to self study) the basis I hold from Interlingua really helped me in grokking the two linguas materne... And actually a Galician professor has been in the news for going viral on TikTok speaking and writing only Interlingua to the millions of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian speakers [0]. It's a fairly interesting language, and easy to grasp for English speakers I think since most of the Latinate spelling are really similar to English rendition of them (but pronounced regularly like Italian or Spanish). For Toki Pona, it's a really interesting language. I should dedicate some time to learn it... A minimal language that can endlessly be extended as long as your speaking partner understand your terms. That's an intriguing prospect. [0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/interlingua-tiktok/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/interlingua-tiktok/ [1] https://www.tiktok.com/discover/interlingua?lang=es https://www.tiktok.com/discover/interlingua?lang=es
sterlind 5y ago
I made it halfway through, a decade back. It's not usable for practical communication, but it's an interesting experiment in linguistically forcing a Zen mindset. For instance, "telo nasa" is alcohol, but it literally means "crazy water." "pona" means good, simple and beautiful, while "ike" means bad, evil, complex and ugly. There are no numbers besides 1 and 2, and no ways to embed clauses. Translating into Toki Pona is like describing the world to a 5-year old feral child. I recommend it.

anonporridge 5y ago

Related, I've often wondered whether people have categorized languages by how they change the way you think. While efficient communication of ideas is important, what seems just as if not more important to me is how the language allows a brain think. We think in our language, and there are tradeoffs between languages on the patterns of thought that are easy and that which are difficult. I'd rather learn a language that gives me a new model for thinking about the world more creatively, more collectively, or just in an entirely alien way that few people think like. And going a step further, it would be fascinating to experiment with constructing languages with the intention of building a kind of novel "brain firmware" that would help people think in ways no human ever has. I suppose programming languages are like that to some extent.

jhanschoo 5y ago
> Related, I've often wondered whether people have categorized languages by how they change the way you think. This probably has a lot to do with the society of speakers that you use your language with. For example, you use a very different register with very different thought patterns with your gangmates in your bad teenage years than with the client at your luxury sales job. There are concepts that will be simply be taboo to express to either speaker that would be natural conversation in the other. I really disagree that there are expressions that are impossible to express in language, barring that limitation. Either a circumlocution will give an approximation (including where the original is ambiguous), or an expression can be coined to be introduced to that language, the society of speakers willing.
hoseja 5y ago
I don't think everyone thinks "in language" all the time. I certainly find it much more efficient to think in abstract concepts and only compile them down to language when I need to communicate them.

mitchbob 5y ago

https://archive.md/BEQCk https://archive.md/BEQCk

ekam 5y ago

Relevant: https://www.gwern.net/Language https://www.gwern.net/Language