French speakers use sound and face to expand bandwidth beyond that available in their limited-vocabulary language. Watching our guide, I was comprehending 80% of what he said; eyes closed, I would have captured half as much. Are tonal quality and gesture substitutes for words? Does surplus of one compensate for shortage of the other? Do the French use visual cues to cope with their language's stunted vocabulary? Conversely, have the English developed the world's largest vocabulary to compensate for lack of tonal, facial, and bodily expressiveness?
But faces reveal more than sounds. Do the English use language as a shield to convey information while hiding their feelings? Is their world-renowned chilly unreadability an inevitable consequence of them denying listeners the visual or tonal clues critical to understanding nuance? (If irony and droll humor were an Olympic sport, the English would take every gold.)
Meanwhile, as we move to ever more distant and faster communication, are we choking off our ear for nuance? We are all familiar with email flame wars and email misunderstandings - evidence that pure language, unless wielded more deftly than most people can, is prone to emotional ambiguity.
As we gravitate to an Internet world, English likely will become the dominant language not just because the world's richest and most technologically sophisticated nation speaks it (the reason most often cited) but also because: