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Hey guys. I remember reading on the Metaverse once an faux article about how the Japanese language uses so many more syllables than the Chinese language that the Chinese can actually finish their business meetings more quickly. I've been looking for it all over, but haven't been able to find it. Can anybody help me out with this?

Thanks,

-Ken

Was this it?

http://omniglot.com/language/articles/morning.htm

Chibi wrote:Was this it?

http://omniglot.com/language/articles/morning.htm

That is it! Thank you very much!

That's cute. From what I can tell, he's actually serious, not a "faux article", although he may not have intended to have his writing appear on omniglot.com at the time. And even though syllable count is not always a good measure of the speed of speech, I've heard that English movies dubbed into Chinese tend to have plenty of time to spare whereas when dubbing into Japanese they often are forced to decide between leaving things out or having the characters speaking unnaturally quickly.

There seems to be a similar pattern in Europe running against the grain of the language family borders, where languages spoken at the Western fringe of Europe (English, French, Portuguese, possibly Gaelic) are spoken more quickly than those immediately to the east (German, Spanish), and then the pattern continues as moving east languages become even more lax, with Italian, Greek, and the Slavic languages (especially Russian) being the most heaviest of all.

Definite or indefinite?