They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and when we think about languages, this premise is often true. The meaning of a sentence can often be conveyed with only a few words; the rest may result as redundant and boring to the recipients.
Linguistic economy or its tendency towards brevity is a principle inherent to language: based on its primary function of communication, it seeks convenience and the least amount of effort at the phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic levels. What are its characteristics and the clearest examples worldwide?
If we consider the number of speakers, English is today the most spoken language in the world, with 1.5 billion people who speak it natively or as a second language. In this list, Spanish appears as fourth, with 548.3 million speakers. Likewise, the language of Cervantes is the second most common language in the United […]
In addition to the simplicity of its inflections, English has two main characteristics: flexibility of use and openness of its vocabulary to new words. The latter implies both the free admission of words from other languages and the ready creation of compound terms and derivatives. Although this language, like so many others, has borrowed many […]