Say What? Study Reveals Best Language At Getting Straight To The Point

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

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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."