[Terr_]

I think there's some research out there that suggests all natural languages have about the same information density, when you factor how two people in conversation will add error-correction or extra context to frame an idea.

IMO this suggests the bottleneck is something about our brains on a biological rather than linguistic level.

[godarderik]

According to a study published several years ago, mainstream languages seem to operate on an information density/speed tradeoff [1].The authors found that languages that are spoken faster seem to encode less information per syllable than those uttered at a slower pace.

This does seem to suggest that biology may be the limiting role in controlling the rate at which humans convey information. Indeed, the language mentioned in the article seems almost laughably cryptic and dense. However, I feel that the limitation of the mentioned study results from the fact that it treats information on a relatively limiting per syllable basis. Quijada seems to suggest that an artificially constructed language has the ability to incorporate all the implicit meanings of a phrase that are left unsaid in normal conversation.

Ultimately, while Quijada's project seems quite unlikely to catch on among those who are not fringe pseudoscientists, it poses interesting philosophical questions about the nature of speech and communication and perhaps earns its title as a "conceptual-art project."

[1] http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs...

[notahacker]

The article seems to support the information density / speed tradeoff, in hinting several times that the language's inventor puts at least as much cognitive effort into agglutinating syllables to form a word in his language as he would into joining words to make a sentence in a second language.

[hueving]

>The authors found that languages that are spoken faster seem to encode more information per syllable than those uttered at a slower pace.

I think you mean the inverse.

[godarderik]

Fixed it, thanks.

[micro_cam]

i think it is more auditory and has to do with out ability to error correct. Actually there is a really fascinating section in james gleick's "the information" on African drum communication which is essentially a much less dense version of spoken language since you say everything using a long sentence which essentially reduces the possibility of it being misinterpreted despite most of the sounds of normal spoken language are missing. Not sure if more scholarly work supports this idea but if this is the case then a written or thought language could certainly be denser...like symbolic algebra or python.