I have a lot of friends who are native Spanish speakers, and when I listen to them talk together the sheer quantity of sound amazes me. I speak a little Spanish myself, but I can't speak or comprehend as quickly as my friends can; it can take me a considerable amount of time just to formulate and enunciate proper sentences. One of the aspects of Spanish that frustrates me is its sheer inefficiency. For example, consider the following common sentences (which I'll translate with Babelfish because I'm not that confident of my Spanish):
¿Dónde está el baño? (7 syllables)As you can imagine, if a giant monkey actually were standing behind you, you'd want to know as soon as possible. Those extra 8 syllables could mean the difference between life and muerte. Spanish can save syllables relative to English in some situations -- some verb conjugations do not require explicit subjects that are necessary in English, for example -- but most of the time it takes longer to say the same thing.
Where is the bathroom? (5 syllables)¿Tiene usted hambre? (7 syllables)
Are you hungry? (4 syllables)Sus zapatos se arden. (7 syllables)
Your shoes are on fire. (6 syllables)Un mono gigante está estando parado detrás de usted. (19 syllables)
A giant monkey is standing behind you. (11 syllables)
The problem is, English is hardly ideal either. Many of our most common concepts take two syllables to express (such as "maybe" and "I am"). But why think small? Sure, we can create contractions and short-cuts ("I am" goes to "I'm"), but we're still being inefficient -- let's make a whole new language built on phonemes rather than entire syllables!
There are 24 consonent phonemes and 14 vowel phonemes (in English, not all sources agree), giving us a total of 38 unique sounds to work with. (Need a review of phonemes?) An efficient language could assign the 38 most common concepts to these phonemes, and the 1444 next-most-common concepts to phoneme pairs. Not every pair or every sequence would be pronouncable, but most of them would be, with practice. What takes an entire sentence to express in modern English could be related with a single word in my new phoneme language!
The question then would be whether or not the human brain can generate or comprehend a faster, more efficient spoken language. Frankly, I doubt that it can. Even though our brains are highly specialized natural language machines, translating audio waves into mental concepts is incredibly difficult, and possibly the most complex operation our brains perform. The only other function that comes close to it in sheer processing power is our vision system.
See what kinds of nonsense I come up with when I go on vacation?
But notice these great efficiencies:
1. Implicit subject : You use the subject one time in a long sentence, all other times it is implicit. For instance:
The detective looked for clues, so he entered the room carefully. He looked around. He though something important. He remembered his training and all that he had learnt.
El detective buscaba pistas, asi que entro al cuarto cuidadosamente. Miro a su alrededor. Penso algo importante. Recordo su entrenamiento y todo lo que habia aprendido.
(instead of: asi que el entro. El miro a su alrededor. El penso algo importante. El recordo su entrenamiento y todo lo que el habia aprendido)
This can very useful in long descriptions and novels - use the sustantive once, in the following sentences referring to the same subject is implicit.)
Also it can be implicit when the subject is clear from the sentence (usually when it refers to "I" or "you")
So in the example, you would say:
Tiene hambre ? or Tienes hambre ? (4 syllabes)
(instead of Tiene usted hambre o Tienes tu hambre). In colloquial spanish you would use this implicit form.
2. For diminutives and aumentatives, you just add one syllabe to the subject (-ito or -ote or -on).
dog: perro
very big dog: perrotote (instead of perro muy grande)
big dog: perrote or perron (instead of perro grande)
little dog: perrito (instead of perro chiquito)
very little dog: perritito (instead of perro muy chiquito)
For the monkey you could say:
un monote (a big monkey) instead of mono gigante.
3. Another advantage of spanish is that the alphabet is phonetic. You always read A, E, I, O, U wit the same phoneme, which makes learning reading easier. (not like apple and maple, the A is different there)
And then, when you learn new words, you know exactly how to pronounce them just by reading them.
In english, in most of cases you have to memorize the same word once, to know how is written, and then once, to know how it is pronounced. Takes a lot of memory.
4. The I agree that some things are easier to say in english and maybe shorter to say.
And one of the great advantages of english, and which makes it easy to learn is that most of the "things" are neutral. You say "the" sun, "the" moon, "the" computer. This takes off a great blunder from memory. In spanish you have to know "El" sol, "La" luna, "
la" computadora, etc.
So there are advantages and disadvantages, as expected. That is why someone invented esperanto, the universal language.
Anyway, nice random musing.
It's true that Spanish is rather elegant in some ways, as you mention. Noun declension is annoying, however.
A phoneme-based language would be incredibly hard to learn.
Another remarkable example of efficiency in english is the abbreviation of names and use of acronyms. Why use the long word over and over again ?
So William is Bill, Michael Mike, Randall Randy, etc. The tendency is to use two-syllabe names.
Also acronyms, I don't have to give examples there, but they are everywhere in english.
But there seems to be a tendency towards efficiency.
To be fair u shouldnt trust a computer to speak efficient spanish. In particular:
"A giant monkey is standing behind you."
would be translated as
Tienes un mono gigante detras (10 syll.)
But the impression that you have is absolutely true, we use a lot more syllables in spanish than u do in english. Now that doesnt mean english is more efficient, simply carries information in a different way: English has a lot more sounds tahn spanish. Coding them is difficult, both spoken and written, and so you can see that actually communicating the same idea takes pretty much the same space / time in spanish and english, since a two-syllable word takes a lot more characters to write in english than spanish, and also is harder to pronounce (hence the impression that english is spoken more slowly than spanish - otherwise it wouldnt be comprehensible)
Spanish simpler sound system does have an advantage: its a lot more stable, and so spanish shows a lot less variability than english. On the negative side, it is harder to addapt foreign words in spanish than in english
Have you actually created this said language? Considering statistical information regarding common and less common words, you could permute through the consonant and vowel phonemes (provided my assumption on the term was correct) and produce words to replace English words. Not really crafting a new language but making shorter pseudonyms...