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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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I read something ( similar to this) about the maximum data transfer per second in different languages being basically the same.
Some languages with less nuance, or fewer letters/syllables have less information per syllable, but tend to speak faster, while more 'complicated' languages have more information per syllable, but tend to speak slower.
The general trend was a maximum amount of speech 'data' that could be processed by an average human brain per second.
No idea how this would relate to second languages, and how people with 'fast' languages react to speaking 'slow' ones. Would be cool to see some data/research on it. Anocdotally, a lot of people struggle to understand Indians speaking English, is that because of the accent and/or poor English (second language, don't diss them!) or because they are speaking faster than our natural language data speed?
I used to think they spoke English as a second language too but that isn't always the case. Indian English is its own valid dialect and is a learned way of speaking as a first language. (Source - married an Indian, traveled India, seen some schools there, saw kids/family members studying, etc..)
Funnily enough, IIRC Anglo-Indians have recognized minority status and have their own special designated member of the Indian Parliament
That's fair, I read the other comment about it actually being the common language throughout India which is interesting. I guess it's just a more extreme version of the US/UK/AU English differences, we may differ over time, but should remain close enough to understand 99% of the time
I have a hard time with Indian accents. I think part of it is they stringwordstogether and don't separate them.
it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don't accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn't hard to follow her at all. I'm often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.
Oh yeah... and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy...
What do you mean by accent syllables?
Oh that reminded me of one time I was in hospital really sick & an Indian doctor was examining me. She said, "Do you have any wessicles?" Ummm what is that? "Wessicles... I can't remember the English word..." She tried describing wessicles and it hit me - blisters. "Yes, yes! Blisters!" She had actually been saying vesicles, which to be fair I would have to have looked up if I came across it in a book. We had a good laugh, she diagnosed me correctly, I got the right meds, and I recovered.
Many Indian languages allow words in a logical unit to be stringed together as long as it sounds okay (so basically, avoid consonant - consonant joining).
My hypothesis in this regard is that English has specially slow vowels because it's encoding a lot of information in said vowels. As in: they need to be slower to be distinguishable.
And, when speakers of language A learn language B, they tend to transfer A's prosody into B. (I believe that this should be uncontroversial as a claim.) That might even get ingrained into a local variety, like Indian English as L1.
So the hard time that people have understanding those Indian English speakers and L2 English speakers from India would be mostly that they don't get which vowel the Indian speaker is conveying. For example "bit", "beet", "bait" sounding almost identical. That goes side-to-side with what you said about "faster than our natural language data speed", as they're effectively encoding more info into a certain amount of time than other speakers are able to decode.
Thanks for the link, I found it very interesting!