I have given the example that the English has roughly
400 species of sound. For the number of consonants in English is roughly 20 and
the number of vowels is also roughly 20, as each consonant meet each vowel make
one species of sound, then 20x20=400. Besides this, vowels can make species of
sound independently, for instance a, e, i, o, u can be independent species of
sound, then you may say the total number must be 400+20=420. But for not all of
this species are fully used, we can only say it is roughly 400.
Suppose each of the modern language in the world has a
vocabulary of 100,000 words. Then, in the best chance the English need
400x400=160,000>100,000. That means it need every two sounds’ combination to
represent the 100,000 words. What about the binary or two species of sound
language can do? It would be 217=131,072>100,000 that is to say,
the binary sound speaker has to use the combination of 17 sounds to represent a
word among the 100,000 words. He use a time 17/2=8.5 longer than English
speaker. We may use this as sample for every language in the world. That is to
say, use the binary sounds’ language as a standard, let each language to
compare with it when the vocabulary size is settled as 100,000. Then, we has a
list that can compare the efficiency of all language. This efficiency is: in a
certain time how many information carried by sound has been send away. From
this calculation we may find that with more different species of sound a
language is more efficiency. The efficiency of a language is decided by the
number of the sound group.
Once we understand this function, then we can
calculate the thinking speed. We know the thinking process in most case is a
process of ‘speak in mind’, the efficient language will speak in mind
efficiently too. For instance, above calculation shown English speaker will be
8.5 time faster than a binary sounds language in sending information. A
linguist Yuan-Ren Chao 赵元任believed
that between the oral speaking and thinking speeds there could be a
coefficient. And until now, no one can find a right method to settle this
coefficient, scientist even don’t know if it is a variable or a constant? If it is a variable, then what is its
independent variable?
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