Linguists from the University of Lyon in France looked at seven widely
spoken languages to see how they rank in terms of efficiency. Which
mother tongue works best at imparting information? A clue: it’s not
French.
Imparting information is language’s most important function – and a recent study published in Language rates just how efficient English, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin-Chinese and German are at doing just that.
Three French linguists at the University of Lyon recorded 59 people,
divided equally among men and half, reading five-sentence texts
identical in meaning at a normal speed in their mother tongue. Then they
computer-edited out the pauses and counted syllables and information
per time unit and language. The goal was to draw conclusions about how
fast a specific density of information could be communicated in the
seven languages.
The result? Some languages are spoken faster than others. For
example, Japanese speakers say eight syllables per second, whereas
Mandarin Chinese get in only five. But regardless, a faster tempo in no
way implied faster transmission of information.
Linguistics professor Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon of the University of
Klagenfurt (Austria) said she was not surprised by the result. In 2010,
using a different methodology, she conducted a similar study using 51
languages.
All researchers found that no matter how slow a language is, the
complexity of syllables means that information is imparted as quickly as
it is in faster languages. Thus, for example, a slow and very complex
language like German manages to rate as slightly more efficient than
fast-paced Japanese. And it comes in third after English, which garnered
first place, and Chinese, which came in second.
To the surprise of the researchers, however, differences in efficiency were only minimal.
-worldcrunch.com
================
Poor Public School Education Not Wall St. to Blame
(cnn)
Best selling author and Harvard professor
Niall
Ferguson recently had at it on CNN with Columbia professor and director of
the Earth Institute Dr. Jeffrey Sachs over the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Sachs -
as
he recently told the Daily Ticker - thinks Wall Street has acted like
robber
barons and deserves harsher regulations and increased taxes.
Ferguson sees it differently.
"Many things about Wall street were
wrong," he tells Henry Blodget. "But, you can't say all of our
problems are because of the criminality of one percent of the population."
What IS to blame for America's growing wealth
gap?
In a word: globalization.
"It's globalization that mainly causes
inequality by exposing the unskilled in the United States to competition from
much cheaper labor in Asia," he says. "That's a much bigger cause of
inequality than malpractice on Wall Street."
Ferguson blames the lack of skilled workers in
this country on a "very poor public education at the high school level. We
are failing kids in the poorer parts of this country."
The remedy, Ferguson contends, is not to tax the
rich and expand federal programs as Sachs recommends. Instead, Ferguson says
public high schools need more competition to raise the bar. The best way
to do that, in his opinion, is to create more charter schools. "The
charter school movement is one very straightforward way in which the ordinary
citizen can actually help improve the quality of high school education."
