Languages are governed by trade-offs. One that avoids making certain information mandatory may be easy to speak, but leaves the listener to fill in the gaps
for unknown adults and formal speech. Natives of those languages miss that distinction when speaking English. Those whose languages don’t make it in the first place often resent having this choice forced on them in French or German.A dictum among linguists is that languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must. Given the time and willingness to explain or coin basic terms, any language could be used to talk about anything.
The many different things a language can and must do are the subject of “Are Some Languages Better than Others?”, a book from 2016 by R.M.W. Dixon of James Cook University in Australia. Mr Dixon dispels old colonialist prejudices that European languages are sophisticated and indigenous ones primitive. Indeed, many of the most nuanced discriminations are required not by French or German but among isolated traditional communities.
In answering his title’s provocative question, Mr Dixon finds that requiring distinctions , is useful. The more information, the better. But not every language can require every distinction: a language that had them all would be too hard for members of the community to learn, to say nothing of outsiders. There may be an outer limit to how complex languages can get, constrained by the brain’s processing power.
Into the argument about whether some languages are superior comes a recent paper on information density in speech, by François Pellegrino and his colleagues at the University of Lyon. Some languages, like Japanese, have few distinct sounds and tight rules on how syllables may be structured, so that the number of possible syllables is low (think
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