Language Log

« previous post | next post »

Thanks to the productive, enlightening discussion we had in the first part of this post, I could not help but think of "speed" as a category of modern life.  That led me to remember a book buried in my dungeon (downstairs study) that I had read about a quarter of a century ago.  It wasn't anything like William S. Burroughs Speed.  It was more on the order of a history of science work.

So I descended the stairs to my basement library.  It wasn't long before I found it:

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick 

• • Topic: This popular book explores the modern, tech-driven obsession with speed and how it affects nearly every aspect of life, from our work habits and communication to our personal time.
  • Summary: Gleick discusses the "hurry sickness" of modern life and the paradox that even with time-saving devices, we feel more rushed than ever. 

After reading Gleick's volume, I definitively decided to check out of the frantic hustle bustle of modern life.  But I was already predisposed to such a lifestyle.  Everyone who knows me is aware that my logo / totem is a snail.  Slow, man, slow.  My maxim is "Wōniú jīngshén. Mànman lái 蝸牛精神。 慢慢來！" ("Snail spirit.  Take your time!)

Thanks to AIO, I found the following additional books on what happens when we speed up the tempo of the natural tempo of things such as speech.

Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left by Mark C. Taylor 

• • Topic: This book presents a philosophical and cultural analysis of our speeding world, connecting it to modern capitalism.
  • Summary: Taylor offers an account of how the very forces meant to free up our time have trapped us in a race we cannot win, and he argues for a more deliberative pace of life

In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore 

• • Topic: A journalistic investigation of the "Slow Movement" and its resistance to the constant need for speed in modern life.
  • Summary: Honore takes readers on a journey to explore the Slow Movement in various aspects of life, including food, work, and sex, offering a counter-cultural perspective

The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster by Robert Colvile 

• • Topic: This book examines the increasingly rapid pace of society, taking a different view from other "slow" books.
  • Summary: Colvile explores the ways our lives are speeding up due to technology and argues that, contrary to popular belief, this might be a good thing. 

Note that the last author comes to the conclusion that increasing tempos might be beneficial in some respects.

To oppose quickness per se would be to have a Luddite mentality, which I do not approve of

Of course, some people drawl and some people rattle away like Gatling guns, but that is their natural bent.  The speed (slow or fast) is not enhanced mechanically or electronically.

Protocol for speaking in the presence of or about exalted personages or deities may also be a factor in the speed and pitch of characters in drama and ritual.  I describe this phenomenon in "Fast talking" (4/9/24:

instances where I experienced royal language was in watching Javanese shadow play performances.  I have a particular interest in wayang kulit and other types of wayang, especially wayang beber (with pictures on scrolls) and wrote about them extensively in Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis.

In all types of wayang, the dalang (performer) employs an extraordinary range of linguistic registers, from low, earthy colloquial to language that is heavily imbued with Sanskritic and Old Javanese forms, while the very highest register is reserved only for royal personages.  When I attended performances of wayang by Indonesian dalangs, I could tell when they shifted from one register to another because they had a noticeably different sound and cadence, but I didn't understand any of it.

Once, however, in the mid-70s, I attended an extraordinary wayang kulit performance in Paine Hall at Harvard University. Everything that the American dalang said and sang was in translated English, and when he delivered his lines in middle register, I could understand everything.  However, when he shifted into lower and higher registers, his voice was electronically manipulated and modulated in such a fashion that it became more and more difficult to comprehend the higher and lower he went on the scale of politeness versus vulgarity.  The effect was uncanny.  I still remember straining to pick out bits and pieces of the lower and higher registers, and could manage with effort when the dalang was using what would have been mid-levels on the politeness scale of Javanese.  But when he adopted the highest and lowest levels of speech and song, I could comprehend virtually nothing of what he was saying and singing.

When it comes to sheer, sustained, rapid language flow, 

The fastest sustained speech I ever heard was that of a village headman in west central Bhojpur District of Nepal.  Whether he was speaking Nepali or Rai, the words spewed from his mouth like bullets from a machine gun.  I always marvelled at how people could possibly comprehend him.  I understood about 80-90% of Nepali speech at normal speed, but listening to the village headman, I could only catch about half or less of what he was saying.  Incidentally, he was the only person for many miles around who had a horse.

Just as there are fast talkers and slow talkers, so there are fast readers and slow readers.  I recall that, back in the late 1950s, Evelyn Wood offered speed reading courses.  I looked into them a little bit, but was never impressed about their efficacy.  I myself have highly differential reading speeds, depending upon the material I am reading, the purpose for which I am reading it, the exigencies of my time constraints, and so forth.  The greatest variable in my reading speed depends upon how carefully I am concentrating when I read things on the first pass.  What really slows me down more than anything else is when I forget the point of what I just read and then have to go back and read it a second or third time.  That means:  NO DISTRACTIONS when reading.

 

Selected readings

• "Watching videos at 2x speed" (8/23/25)
• "Fast talking" (4/9/24) — required reading for a full understanding of the present post; it covers the following, among others:  quantitative linguistics, Claude Shannon, number of syllables per second, information, efficiency, density, complexity, meaning, pronunciation, prosody, speed, gender

Sample gem of this Atlas Obscura (4/2/24) article by Dan Nosowitz, based on the research of François Pellegrino 

Japanese, for example, has an extremely high number of syllables spoken per second. But Japanese also has an extremely low degree of complexity in its syllables, and much less information encoded per syllable. So the syllables come out at a faster rate, but you need more of them to convey the same amount of information as a slow language, like, say, Vietnamese.

…

Generally speaking, the more complexity we can cram into a syllable, the more information it carries. [VHM:  emphasis added] Japanese is faster than English—around 12 syllables per second, maybe even a couple more for an especially fast speaker—but if English can convey the same information in five syllables, is Japanese really “faster”?

August 26, 2025 @ 12:27 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Intelligibility, Language and technology

Permalink