most spacious-efficient written language

[道艺]

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Today, before heading out the door, I took a glance at my water heater and thought to myself if the product info had been written in English, whether they would have had to use a smaller font or additional acronyms to be able to fit it all on the same sized sticker. 

 

Is Chinese the most efficient written language as far as maximizing the space:meaning ratio? 

[xinoxanu]

澳大利亚

Australia ?

 

Logograms definitely convey the most amount of meaning in the least amount of space, but that's only when they they are used to express the concepts they were originally designed for. Once you start combining them to represent new ideas, foreign words or phonetically to represent sounds without caring about the meaning... things can get pretty wild. But yes, in the end Chinese is probably the modern language with the most efficient space:meaning ratio of all, and words with more than 3 characters are not that common anyway.

 

Let's hope it never goes the Spanish way. "Otorrinolaringólogo" is a pain in the ass to pronounce while being sober, as many spaniards can certainly tell you.

[道艺]

The thing about Spanish though is that it seems to be the most consistent as far as phonetics -> pronunciation from any phonetically written alphabet I've studied

 

Regardless of word length, words read how they should be read, unlike this sentence which has read/read