Max Atkinson's Blog

Julian Assagne's speech from the Ecuadorian embassy in London the other day may not have been too badly written, but his delivery left much to be desired. His expressionless face, peculiar pausing and repetitive gesticulating with his fist made me wonder whether he'd read it through at all, let alone at several rehearsals. The only time he showed signs of coming alive was when he recited a long list of names of Latin American countries (3:47 minutes in)

Great Britain has as many gold medals as the Soviet Union

As one who was brought up to expect Great Britain never to win more than a tiny handful of Olympic gold medals, our current haul of 16 golds, 11 silver and 10 bronze got me wondering how this would have compared with the score of what used to be a major Olympic player, the Soviet Union - if its constituent countries still counted as one.

The answer is that they too would now be at 16 gold medals:

(Gold Silver Bronze)
Russian Federation 4 16 15
Kazakhstan 6 0 0
Belarus 2 2 3
Ukraine 2 0 5
Lithuania 1 0 1
Georgia 1 0 0
Azerbaijan 0 1 2
Armenia 0 1 1
Moldova 0 01
Uzbekistan 0 0 1

... which sounds like encouraging news for those of us of a certain age!

All Greek to me: but how much do native speakers gesticulate?

Just back from a fortnight's sunshine - yes, every single day - on a Greek island, here are some holiday snaps that got me thinking (again) about a theme touched on from time to time on this blog, namely the question of whether some languages are inherently more long-winded than others, and the implications this may have (if any) for things like gestural activity while speaking.

1. My first specimen, with 5 syllables of Greek being translated into 3 syllables of English hardly qualifies as decisive enough:

2. But, on an Olympic Airways flight, 13 syllables of Greek was translated (condensed?) into 6 syllables of English suggests the former may be rather more long-winded:

3. And another handy message on the same flight was translated (condensed?) from 17 syllables of Greek into 7 syllables of English:

Latin v. Greek?

In the first of the posts below, I suggested that there may be a good reason why speakers of Latin-based languages like French, Italian and Spanish are alleged to wave their hands about a lot when speaking - and that it might have something to do with it being more challenging to hold the attentiveness of speakers of/listeners to long-winded languages.

On the basis of this small sample, Greek appears to be far more long-winded than English. Yet I've never heard Greeks included in lists of keen Mediterranean gesticulators.

So today's question is whether there are any native speakers or observers out there who can shed light on this intriguing issue?

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