Laziness and Data-Density

 It's been a while, friend.  I almost didn't recognize you. Did you do something new to your hair recently? It looks fantastic.

Look, I wish I had a legitimate excuse for having not written anything in over two months, but honestly, I've just been lazy and uninspired, relentlessly encumbered by the constant stream of negative news I encounter every time I use social media. 

"Delete it, then."

To which the boy replied, "No."

You can pry my social media from my cold, dead hands. 

Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is cool.

Dad, wait, I'm trolling someone on the forums at PizzaMaking.com. 

Speaking of knowledge, I feel like telling you about something nifty I thought and read about this week. It's not so much about language learning as it is about learning about language. You dig?

SPEED OF INFORMATION CONVEYANCE THROUGH SPOKEN LANGUAGE

Now, before I start making bold claims and rehashing half-truths that I've read on less-than-reputable websites, I'm going to make a disclaimer that, contrary to all of your beliefs, I do not have a doctorate in linguistics or anything of that academic nature (unless you count being a beast at Mario Kart Wii as an academic field). I absolve myself of all accountability, and I'll try my best not to gaslight you into thinking that Finland doesn't really exist at some point in the future.

 I'm just a boy with an internet connection who likes to read words about words, and maybe learn some new words in my spare time. 

THE BACKDROP:

I stand in my kitchen sometimes. Headphones in, music blasting, butter knife in hand, eyes glazed over. 

No thoughts. Just vibes. Suddenly, many thoughts. 

Gone. No thoughts again. Alone. Sigh.

I skulk back to my bedroom after spending a firm thirty minute chunk of my night zoning out of this realm. Suddenly, a thought that had sprinted through my brain while I was mentally "out to lunch" sprints right back in. I lock eyes with it. 

"You're not going anywhere," I assert. "You're mine."

 Nothing else matters anymore. 

Time to fixate.

The thought is a question: "Do some languages convey information faster/more efficiently than others?"

The thought isn't worded exactly like that, okay, it's more of a feeling. But that's what I narrowed the thought down to, and that's what I typed into the search bar. 

Short answer? No.

Long answer? No, but there's context. And context is important.

Believe it or not, I'm not the first person to go into a stasis mode and wonder about the relative speed of information conveyance between different languages. Damn. It's just like that one guy Goethe said, "All truly wise thoughts have been thought thousands of times already." There's more to that quote, but it won't fit my narrative, and so I will not include it. Like I said, context is important. Consider yourself misquoted, old man. 

Goethe. Look at him, lounging around, thinking about color theory and poetry. Nice Snuggie, nerd. 

I suppose it's not such a bad thing, though. God knows I'm too lazy to conduct statistically sound and scientifically accurate research myself.

Now.

There's a commonly held notion amongst native English speakers that Spanish speakers talk at an astoundingly quick pace. Rapid fire, baby. Akimbo. FMJ. You took two years of Spanish during high school? Futile.

I'm one of those aforementioned English speakers who thinks Spanish sounds rather, uh, zippy. As such, this isn't the first time that I've wondered if some languages express information quicker than others. It's just the first time that I've remembered to explore the answer. You're welcome!

Researchers** from the Université de Lyon tried to frame this question through analyzing the number of syllables spoken per second relative to the amount of information being conveyed with each syllable. In general, the more syllables being spoken per second, the less information is contained within each syllable. And the opposite applies, as well. The fewer syllables spoken per second, the more information is contained within each of those syllables. In essence, different languages have varying levels of data-density. 

"But which one was the fastest," you might find yourself currently shouting into your screen. Let's find out.

Calm down, Drew. I know you're excited about data-density, but you're being dramatic. And I think your popcorn is burning.

RESULTS

To be able to compare the languages against one another, Vietnamese was chosen as a reference language for those being tested, and its syllables were given an arbitrary value of 1. Very dense. Very rad.

Of the languages tested, Mandarin Chinese helmed the density ranking, being listed at 0.94, with an average rate of only 5.18 syllables spoken per second. Molasses.

English clocks in with a density of 0.91 and a speed of 6.19 syllables per second. Nyoom. 

Spanish, that notorious speed demon, pulled quite a bit ahead of English; a density of 0.63 and a speed of 7.82 syllables per second. Awooga.

Japanese, however, was the syllabic track star. It has a relatively low density at 0.49, but a speed of 7.84 syllables per second. And we're off to the races.

That's all fine and dandy, but I really do wish that more research was being done into this topic. There weren't any languages from the Oceania region included in this study, nor were there any native American languages. I expect that the results would be consistent with what's already been found, almost as if there's a natural cap at how much information humans are able to deliver through spoken language, leading to a fairly uniform speed of information delivery across language families and geographical regions. But until all languages have been tested, we're just assuming that it's consistent, and you know what assuming does, don't you?

Information density, syllables per second, conveyance of meaning, context, yadda yadda yadda.

Listen. Whether you're going for a rapid fire of syllables in Spanish and Japanese, or taking a slower, denser approach with Mandarin and English, the thing you're trying to convey will take roughly the same amount of time to say. So relax a bit, and share this new knowledge of yours with someone in your life who could not give a damn.

The universe has a cool way of balancing things out, and that's kind of beautiful. 

Look, dad, a Blue Shell just flew by.

**http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html