geo1963:

Wrong, in Polish the sentence:

"Excuse me, I don't understand, could you repeat it please?"

translates to:

"He?"

There is a very similar word in English: "Huh?"
Polish wins by a single letter.

Reading all these posts, i get the feeling that a lot of people here study language. From my perspective, the precision of a language is mostly academic. I suspect most people in the world would not care about what language in the world is the most precise. My main concern is, "can i get my message across?". Although both questions are related, the latter depends more on individual knowledge and skill, whereas the former is just technical detail.

It doesn't matter what language is most precise, because only a handful of the worlds population will understand it. I understand this is the whole reason behind IAL's and Esperanto; To give people of any language background, the ability to effectively communicate to another person of any other language background.
The desire to have all these "alternatives" and "quirky" bits of natural language, to me, is like saying you need the most expensive, fully optioned, Mercedes Benz to drive around in, when all you really need, is a good, standard car like a Toyota Camry. All we need to do now, is teach people how to drive

I have gone off on a complete tangent here, so i will shut up now

chrisim101010:

geo1963:

Wrong, in Polish the sentence:

"Excuse me, I don't understand, could you repeat it please?"

translates to:

"He?"

There is a very similar word in English: "Huh?"
Polish wins by a single letter.

... a single orthographic letter, not a pronounced letter!

chrisim101010:

geo1963:

Wrong, in Polish the sentence:

"Excuse me, I don't understand, could you repeat it please?"

translates to:

"He?"

There is a very similar word in English: "Huh?"
Polish wins by a single letter.

In German: "Hä?"

qwertz:In German: "Hä?"

With all do respect you are just loosing the point of my answer. Claiming that English is the most precise language in the world has no evidence. If some 100 pages of English text translate to 102 - 105 pages in another language, then also 100 pages of text in another language translate to 102-105 pages of English. Languages are not simple codes of words. Some ideas in one language are expressed in shorter forms than in other. In one aspect a language is more precise than others, in another it is not. Take Japanese with its multi verbs system - one verb in English may translate to different verbs in Japanese depending on social status of speakers. Here Japanese is more precise than English. Take Polish with its diminutives, I can say:
kwiat - flower
kwiatek - flower, but more tenderly
kwiatuszek - little flower
kwiatusio - little flower with tenderness
kwiatuszeczek, kwiaciątko, kwiaciuś.... and so on. Most of them do not translate into English with a single word. And the same I can do with most nouns in my language.

Thus we conclude (after that strange little bit where we got a bit off-track with the "huh" part...) that each language has parts that are precise, and parts that aren't.

Japanese, Chinese etc have precise social terms, and both have a precise writing system in that various shades of meaning can be covered by a few small changes.

Polish, and similar synthetic langauges have precise grammar, so that the person on the receiving end of a message has a good idea of the quantity of each entity talked about in the message and the relationships between each entity.

English (and feel free to stick in whatever other languages you like, I'd put Indonesian and some other languages in this category too) have a stupid amount of words with various related meanings that can be used interchangeably in some circumstanes and yet contrast in other circumstances, allowing for various shades of meaning. (and in English's case, then there are words that mean the same thing but are completely different looking).

With some of those above examples not sharing eachothers' attributes and some sharing eachothers' attributes. Japanese lacks the plural of Polish and English in many circumstances. English (and I think Japanese) lack the noun case system of Polish. Esperanto has a bit of the bottom two categories and barely any of the first, although it's easy to get around thanks to the word-bulding system.

And so forth. Consensus reached (jk)

geo1963:

qwertz:In German: "Hä?"

With all do respect you are just loosing the point of my answer. Claiming that English is the most precise language in the world has no evidence.

I didn't claim that English is the most precise language in the world. And I will never claim that. Every language has a culture behind. So, maybe from a isolated "technically" view maybe one language could be more outstanding or precise then other ones. From a cultural (respectfull) view all languages are equal and no language should be - yes - self-centering to be the best or the "truest best" IAL ones. That will ever trigger fight-back emotions or aggressive language preserving actions of someones.

geo1963:
Languages are not simple codes of words. Some ideas in one language are expressed in shorter forms than in other. In one aspect a language is more precise than others, in another it is not.

Please keep in mind that it could be part of some cultures not to speak precise to avoid stuck to one problem solving ideas/tracks etc. That's why french problem solving strategies could much more flexible to new upcoming hazards than German straight forward ones. That seems to be daily communication bussiness at European Airbus plants. I also experienced that French/German+Swiss problem solving differences in real life at the last JES karavano guided by two french folks. Yes, we arrived to and back. Thanks to Emmanuel and Alekĉjo JES karavano problem solving enthusiasm.

We can learn of each other to find a compromise. There's everytime a reason behind somebody is doing something. It's not necessary to blame some language to be not capable of something or carry on historical language ballast.

I don't think anyone is saying that every text in English is shorter than the same text in every other language.

BUT

Regardless of direction of translation, if you have a long text in English and in another language, in general (not always, but in surprisingly many cases) the English text will be shorter.

erinja:I don't think anyone is saying that every text in English is shorter than the same text in every other language.

BUT

Regardless of direction of translation, if you have a long text in English and in another language, in general (not always, but in surprisingly many cases) the English text will be shorter.

Mmm, perhaps we just have small attention spans, so we artificially shorten everything so we don't get bored half way through...

erinja:
Regardless of direction of translation, if you have a long text in English and in another language, in general (not always, but in surprisingly many cases) the English text will be shorter.

Yes, at the expense of its contents or increase in ambiguity. Translated work never equals the original.

geo1963:

erinja:
Regardless of direction of translation, if you have a long text in English and in another language, in general (not always, but in surprisingly many cases) the English text will be shorter.

Yes, at the expense of its contents or increase in ambiguity. Translated work never equals the original.

What if Erinja meant that the source was originally in English and the translated work was the other language?

And a translated work isn't necessarily more ambiguous, I've seen translated works do much better than the original sources. In fact, I believe that before translating Japanese video games became more commonplace in the industry, there was a particular translator whose English versions of the original Japanese writing were actually preferred over the original Japanese, which is sort of rare since, you know, fans of all that popculture stuff tend to be a bit *ahem* rabid about getting things as they were originally intended.

(forgot the actual case, but it was something to do with Final Fantasy or some RPG).