Re: where do so many tenses come from?

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 09:06:58 GMT: "John Atkinson" <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
in sci.lang:

Hawaiian, and other Polynesian languages, are slower
because of the lack of phonemes.

Are they slower?

One would expect them to be faster, in terms of phonemes per seconds,
because each of their phonemes contain fewer bits of information, as
there aren't so many different ones.

So, comparing Portuguese, Hungarian and German, with a similar number
of phonemes, one would expect them to be equally fast. In reality,
Portuguese seem much faster. Spanish has fewer phonemes, but is just
as fast as Portuguese.

This is just my subjective impression. Portuguese seems to become
slower as I learn to understand it better. Hungarian is still much
slower, even though I don't understand a word of it, simply because I
never learnt that language.

Have objective measurements been done? For Portuguese, this could be
useful material: spoken texts that are literally written out (usually
accurately, though not always in every detail):
http://www.radiograciosa.com/noticias.html


--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
Latest addition April 1, 2006: http://rudhar.com/index/whatsnew.htm
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