[jdoliner]

I saw an interesting argument recently that the reason you get this type of verbose language in corporate settings is that English lacks a formal tense. Apparently it's much less common in languages that have one. But in corporate English the verbosity is used as a signal that you took time to produce the text out of respect for the person you're communicating with.

This of course now gets weird with LLMs because I doubt it can last as a signal of respect for very long when it just means you fed some bullet points to ChatGPT.

[adgjlsfhk1]

Seems like an easy hypothesis to test: Do languages with a formal tense have short corporate language?

[Ifkaluva]

I’m a native Spanish speaker—all forms of written Spanish are more verbose than English, but the formal form is even more verbose. I remember notifications my school used to send my parents were hilariously wordy by English standards.

[xdennis]

> notifications my school used to send my parents were hilariously wordy

There might be something else at play there. Public sector workers are notorious for wooden language.

The example I hate the most is how they always say "number of" before every number like "we'll buy 10 new busses" becomes "we will commence the procurement of a number of 10 new buses".

[Ifkaluva]

Public sector workers? No, this was a private school.

[f1shy]

I can speak 4 EU languages besides english. All 4 have special forms which are “formal” all 4 more verbose in the formal form. So if you ask me: “no”

[jdoliner]

This is what the argument I read claimed, I haven't verified it.

[rafram]

Japanese has polite forms, but business emails are anything but shorter than in English: https://shiftasia.com/community/choose-the-right-email-greet...

[foobiekr]

Some of this has massively fallen away over the last thirty years. I spent a lot of time on Japanese linguistics, and the really formal tense usage was already falling away even in business context by the mid-1990s. I still find it fun to construct sentences that are practically gramnatical self-abasement but it's not common in actual spoken or written Japanese.