[narism]

So basically, it's bus width vs. clock rate. Although it looks like there is a natural upper bound on throughput.

One thing the article doesn't mention but the paper goes into is the syllabic complexity. Vietnamese and Chinese both have a ridiculous amount of tones (from a Western perspective). From the paper:

  Language  Syllable Set  Weighted Syllabic Complexity
  English   7,931         2.48
  French    5,646         2.21
  German    4,207         2.68
  Italian   2,719         2.30
  Japanese  416           1.93
  Mandarin  1,191         3.58
  Spanish   1,593         2.4

English gets the density from a huge syllable set and an average syllabic complexity. Mandarin has a fairly small set but high complexity.

From my experience with Japanese, it seems like it has evolved to compensate for the low density:

A lot of the pronouns (I/he/she) tend to be dropped and assumed from context

Some verb forms take the place of longer phrases: taberu koto ga dekimasu->taberaremasu

In spoken/casual usage, many phrases are shortened: oiteoite -> oitoite, my personal favorites are the arigato gozaimasu-> mumble-zaimasu or the irrashaimase->mumble-mase

[minikomi]

Oitoite comes from oite oku I believe. To put, and leave something in place.

[narism]

Yeah, maybe not the best example because it's sort of a repetition of oku, meaning put it there (implied:so I can do something with it in the future). It just stuck in my head because I had heard it conversationally before I learned it in class and had a ding lightbulb moment.

Maybe a better example of ~teoite->~toite shortening is aketeoite (proper, 6 syllables), meaning open it (for some future purpose) -> aketoite (spoken/casual, 5 syllables)?