SpeedTalk

Many people have speculated about "terse speaking", making a new spoken language that can be spoken (and understood !) much faster than English.

Somewhere I thought I read about a language designed to be spoken very rapidly. Maybe it was called "speedtalk", I can't remember.

Elsewhere I read about machines designed to "speed up" any spoken language, but avoiding the "chipmunk effect". (This avoids learning an entirely new language ... apparently humans can listen much faster than they can talk.)

[FIXME: I've lost the links -- please help me find more information].

If teachers could communicate 4 times as fast (Say, they recorded their lectures ahead of time, then played them back on fast-forward), then 4 years of college classes could be compressed into 1 year. (Even if it took the same amount of time to *understand* something, so it still required 4 years, perhaps you could squeeze a week's worth of classes into 2 days, and then spend the rest of the week *doing* useful but routine stuff that left your mind free to ponder what you heard.)

Other minor benefits: books require less paper to print (see TerseWriting , http://papertalk.wiki.taoriver.net/ )

• Some people suspect that it may be impossible to speed up spoken language significantly. Jeff claims that <q> While "word rate" varies somewhat from culture to culture, "information rate" is basically a constant. To express "The little boy was hit by a blue ball and started to cry, but his mother cheered him up with some cookies." will take about the same amount of time in spoken langauge in all languages (meant for face-to-face interaction). </q> http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86294&amp;cid=7504638

• <q> I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages. </q> mikebelrose: <q> No wA! ppl wl nvr tlk lk dat! w@ r U, %-)? </q> </a> http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86294&cid=7511496 (What are you, crazy ?)

• The Language of Superman http://www.cryonics.org/chapter1_6.html <blockquote>

  ... the languages of mathematics and technology permit and promote different and more effective styles of thinking. ...

  ... Supertongue ... Terseness is itself a virtue insufficiently appreciated. Who has not had the experience of reading a long sentence, involving difficult concepts, or complex relations, and found that at the end of the sentence he had forgotten the beginning? If you cannot express an idea briefly, then a combination of ideas may become so awkward that its expression is not just difficult, but impossible. Yet in English, for example, we use unnecessarily long words because most of the one-syllable words have not been allocated.

  ... linguists believe that with moderate ease we can speak and hear at least 100 simple sounds (40) whence it follows, with reasonable assumptions, that the entire unabridged English vocabulary could be reduced to words of one syllable-still leaving plenty of room for redundancy, synonyms, poetic variation, and the monosyllabic rendition of a large store of common phrases! ...

  Our languages are exceedingly weak also in the description of contoured surfaces, including faces; we can easily recognize differences of physiognomy and expression that we are nearly helpless to communicate verbally. ...

  ... </blockquote>

• <blockquote>

  Brev

  Artificial language designed to allow a baseline or near-baseline to communicate the maximum amount of information in the briefest amount of time.

  Brev makes use of the entire range of word sounds that the baseline voice is capable of, not just those belonging to a particular language group. Mostly used by those hu who prefer to avoid using direct mind to mind communication links. The written version of the language employs graphic ideograms. Speakers of Brev brag that they can compress an entire life history into into 5 sentences or 3 lines of ideographs.

  Brev was invented during the early Empires period by a splinter faction of the Refugium Federation, Ecos Ascending

  The language is so compact that a speaker can repeat themself three times before a "slow-language" speakere can say the same thing once. This repetition allows the listener to pick up the patterns of the sentence/paragraph more easily. Sometimes - especially among the cyborg augmented clades, there's a sort of back and forth patter in each exchange like information packets being sent:

  C: Mary had a little lamb :receipt?: D: Mhall :receipt.: C: Whose fleece was white as snow :receipt?: D: Wffwwas :receipt.: C: :incorrect receipt.: :correction: Whose fleece was white as snow :receipt?: D: Wfwwas :receipt.: etc.

  Because of Brev's vulnerability to errors/noise, a lot of effort has been put into reducing or eliminating such problems as the language was developed. One simple method was to eliminate the use of words that sound the same but mean different things. (deer/dear, to/to/too are examples in Information age English). Speed of delivery would not be as much of a factor as tone, prefix and suffix placement and the use of words built around all the phonemes to clearly get a point across without using a lot of individual words to do so. Which is not to say that it would be impossible to be misunderstood, just harder and with a lot more information being misunderstood in one chunk.

  -- Todd Drashner </blockquote> http://www.orionsarm.com/eg/b/Br-Bt.html#Brev

• Inventing a Language by Ben Sussman 1993 http://www.red-bean.com/~sussman/brain/finling.txt seems related to Speedtalk. I find interesting the 10 "variables", similar to pronouns, but they could refer to verbs as well as nouns. All vocabulary is in terms of nouns, with a special prefix to make it into a verb.

• "The language PigEwu has a very simple syntax. Each word in this language has exactly 4 letters. Also each word contains exactly two vowels (y is consider a vowel in PigEwu). For instance, "maar" and "even" are legitimate words, "arts" is not a legal word." http://acm.uva.es/p/v6/604.html

• http://www.rick.harrison.net/langlab/plan_b.html discusses a highly compressed language (Huffman)(continuous speach, no pauses or spaces necessary). Conversion of an arbitrary bitstream to a spoken language and back.

• "ShortTalk: a proposal for improving dictation systems" by Nils Klarlund, January 2002 http://www.research.att.com/projects/ShortTalk/old-paper/short_print.html

  ShortTalk, an editing language built through extensive experimentation over a period of six years. ...

  Since command syllables can be chosen carefully (out of some 15,000 to 30,000 possible syllables) to not generate collisions with English, recognition accuracy of commands can be made much better than dictation accuracy, often reported to be somewhere between 90 and 95 percent. In contrast, studies of keyboard use during editing show that operator errors are very common, frequently around 20% to 30%. These errors include keys hit by mistake. ...

(moved from http://rdrop.com/~cary/html/idea_space.html#speedtalk )