Last time we have
talked about Zhao Yuan Ren 赵元任 (3 November 1892 – 25 February 1982). In 1945, he served as
president of the Linguistics Society of
America. He have tested that by normal speed speaking, ‘When I rehearse the
multiplication table, in English, it takes me around 45 seconds, while in
Chinese it takes me 30 seconds.’ That means to say English cost extra 50% time
than Chinese. And I believe that it is a main reason that why the Chinese student
always get high mark in the International Mathematical Olympiad.
But I also believe that high mark is meaningless for the human’s culture. At Zhao’s
time, it seemed the students didn’t required to rehearse the ‘periodic table of
chemical element’, for he didn’t mention it. If he have rehearsed this table,
he would be understand the English version and Chinese version of it had a bigger
gap of time. In his 《语言问题》Linguistic Issues, he said
that the ancient Chinese language could be even faster when transmitting
message, because they have employed more species of sound. (Here I have to say
that I don’t agree with him. For I believe the ancient people had simpler life
and in their expression, they missed many details and that made them sending
message faster.) Yet he could be the first person who made the qualitative analysis of
languages. My explanation of this phenomenon is from my ‘Language Law’. I
believe that theoretically, the speed of transmitting message of every language
can calculated by comparing with the Morse code, if you regard it is a speaking
language. It is very simple mathematic affair.
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