A Superior Language

Subtitles

What would an ideal language sound like?

Or, what would it look like?

If you were biased,

you might think that English is the most superior,

or that Spanish is the most superior,

or that some other language is the most superior.

But if you think about it for even just a few seconds,

you'll realize how pathetic all of these languages are.

I mean English, the worst of them all,

has words such as "analysis".

Which, by the way, is 100% Latin.

It's not even English.

Same with "pure" which is 100% French,

"trade" which is 100% German,

"simple" which is also 100% French,

"area" which is 100% Latin,

"index" which is 100% Latin,

and basically half the other "English" words.

And I mean, this is a horn.

This is also a horn.

And this is red.

This is also read.

Or you could read it.

Both are spelled exactly the same

but sound different, depending on the mood your in.

I guess...

And of course, this is dessert.

And this is deserted.

And this is the desert.

And of course you deserve this

because it's your desert.

So just don't desert the deserted desert of your desert

or you'll desert the dessert you had that was your

desert in the deserted desert.

[CUT]

Anyway, the point is,

English is completely out of the question

because it's basically just all the other

languages combined into one rubbish pile.

But maybe there's another language that's better.

I mean it's quite possible that somewhere there's a

language that's far superior to anything we've ever seen.

Although...

I don't think we're going to find it amongst humans.

You see, humans have changed their languages

millions of times throughout history.

Which can only mean two things.

One, we still don't have a perfect language.

Or two, we're just really stupid.

You would think that, as the same species,

humans would all speak the same language.

But currently, there's over 7000 languages

spoken amongst humans.

Oh, and, believe it or not,

as incompetent as English is,

it's still the language with the most speakers.

Now before you go clacking away about how

Chinese has the most speakers,

note that English has the most speakers overall,

but Chinese (specifically Mandarin) has the

most "native" speakers.

In fact English has nearly twice as many non-native

speakers as as it does native speakers.

While Mandarin has over 4.6 times more native

speakers than non-native speakers.

Actually,

I guess binary has the most speakers.

I mean, there's over 30 billion electronic devices on Earth,

all of which speak binary so...

Anyway, in total English has over 1.1 billion speakers.

That are all "Made in China".

Oh wait, wrong speakers.

I told you English was confusing.

Especially since there's like tons of words that

have other words that look and/or sound almost

identical to each other.

Kinda like though, through, thorough, tough, trough, thought.

Like was English just made to be confusing?

Ok.

We could try to create a superior language in a

simple yet fully capable way,

a great example being Morse Code.

Morse Code is superior in some ways to English,

mainly in the fact that because it's so simple,

you can speak it with lights,

horns (not that kind), electric pulses, dots and dashes,

and pretty much anything else.

But where it lacks is in the fact that it takes ages just

to communicate one word.

I mean, just communicating one letter can take

anywhere from 30 milliseconds to 2 seconds!

[code audio]

And if you want to communicate

even a very short word like "help!",

it's going to take you anywhere from 6 to 8 seconds!

[code audio]

If you want to communicate a sentence such as

"The current condition is hazardous."

it could take up to a minute!

I guess if you were really great at thinking at the

speed of light you could transmit the information

in lightning fast way.

[code audio]

Most computers would be able to interpret that

but for a human...

that's going to be impossible.

Although, despite all the issues with Morse Code,

it does sound kinda interesting, you got to admit.

Maybe instead of looking at languages invented

by humans though,

we should search for the perfect language in

the animal kingdom.

I mean you can already find many similar languages

to Morse Code amongst many marine animals

and insects such as crickets.

In fact I discovered by accident that crickets

have some sort of code they use for communication

that's nearly identical to Morse Code.

Take a listen to this sound captured just few

inches from the cricket.

[cricket audio]

If you listen to this much slower and analyze the

audio's spectrogram, you'll see that each

singular trill of the cricket is multiple smaller pulses.

[audio slower]

Each pulse appears to be the same pitch

but there's distinctly a code there.

And just like Morse Code,

it's composed of long and short pulses.

I don't know what the code is or how to translate it,

but I do find it quite fascinating!

In fact, I wrote down the code of the full 2 minute clip.

Not that it was of any use.

I'll leave links in the description for the spreadsheet

and the full 2 minute audio clip,

just in case anyone is interested in analyzing

it more thoroughly.

The issue with all these Morse Code type

languages though, is that they're not very elegant.

They sound interesting, sure, but they don't have

the nice flow some other languages have.

Birds, for example, have some of the most elegant

language on the planet.

[goose]

Well...

songbirds at least.

I mean, the Pacific Wren was designed with the most

stunning song I've ever heard.

[song audio]

Sounds great, right?

In those 9 seconds, it's possible the bird could have

said the equivalent of over 50 English words.

In fact, as it turns out, if you play this song at one quarter

it's original speed, you won't hear a bird song at all,

but instead a full orchestra.

[song at 0.25x speed]

Doesn't it just sound like an entire paragraph?

Perhaps it's just me, but

I find these different languages fascinating!

The fact that all these languages sound completely

different but are all still very interesting in their own way.

And sometimes you almost feel like

you can understand them.

Which of these languages was your favorite?

Please don't tell me it was English.