[alricb]

> When speaking, english usually has more syllables per unit time than mandarin, so english has the highest spoken information density of any language.

Of the seven languages in the study, using 20 specific short texts, that were originally written in English then translated (well?) in other languages.

[ggreer]

They recognized this issue and accounted for it. From the paper:

Since the texts were not explicitly designed for detailed cross-language comparison, they exhibit a rather large variation in length. For instance, the lengths of the 20 English texts range from 62 to 104 syllables. To deal with this variation, each text was matched with its translation in an eighth language, Vietnamese (VI), different from the seven languages of the corpus. This external point of reference was used to normalize the parameters for each text in each language and consequently to facilitate the interpretation by comparison with a mostly isolating language (see below).

It shouldn't be particularly surprising that english comes out ahead. It has a huge vocabulary, tons of phonemes, and makes many parts of speech optional. It lacks tones, but would probably have to sacrifice some phonemes to stay comprehensible.

[alricb]

That just deals with the variation in length of the texts, not the effect of translation quality or other possible problems with the experiment, like written -> spoken conversion.