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.