[jinushaun]

This article pretty much confirms a suspicion of mine that I've had for a while: strongly syllabic languages like Spanish, Japanese and Tagalog, with their paltry use of consonant clusters, speak/sound faster because (1) scarcity of consonant clusters without tones means that words require more syllables to be uniquely identifiable, and (2) sounds flow more easily when there is a vowel between every consonant. Unlike a language like German, you're not always stopping your speech to enunciate adjacent consonants. Therefore, longer words + easier to pronounce = fast speech.

[LeafStorm]

I pretty much arrived at the same conclusion when trying to translate various songs into Spanish. You can say sentences normally in about the same amount of time, but you can't fit Spanish versions of an English phrase in the same meter...generally you have to fudge it, and even then it doesn't always work.

[minikomi]

Slightly related - twitter is much more verbose in Japanese purely due to the fact that 140 chars can pack in a lot more information than in English

[asymmetric]

didn't the study state just the contrary: that english is more dense than japanese?

[e2daipi]

This study was about syllables, not characters vs symbols.

Example:

Japanese for mouth 口 = 1 "character" English = 5 charachters

The syllables are irrelevant, though above they match; twitter care about characters.

Also note the:

> "Slightly related"

[makthrow]

Same with Korean and Chinese.