Nana
Which language can express ideas in the least amount of words?
May 20, 2010 7:08 AM
Answers · 3
1
Well, it's not possible to answer that question unless you investigate every language in the world, but I have noticed that English uses less words to express ideas than Spanish or Italian.
May 20, 2010
English is very instrumental. I guess it is the best lng to speak on business, science and technology, maybe philosophy - conveying abstract things. But when we talk about feelings, imagination or emotions - English sucks ;) it has to use spoken and slang things in this case. But in any spoken form of any language we can express the deepest feelings depending on the context. If we take a literature language for that purpose - I vote for Russian.
May 20, 2010
My first response is: acronyms and SMS-ese. ;) It's a bit difficult to compare certain languages; from looking at some dictionaries, you may not get an equivalent definition, but a description instead. Sometimes I prefer to understand a concept in Italian, because there's not a proper English word for it. And vice versa. I noticed from learning Indonesian, a lot of words considered necessary in English are dropped, such as needing to use 'to be', and tenses, and this is done without problem. What I've also learnt of Thai has been so economical that my English brain was always expecting a much much longer sentence.
May 20, 2010
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