A key issue of our vocabulary

Quantity of information passed per moment is not a measure of a language that matters one bit unless we're talking about computer languages. It may not even be a valid measure of writing unless we're talking about news reporting or text-messaging. To reduce any sort of language or idea to that basic level is to dehumanize it.

It doesn't matter at all how many sounds your language has. No natural language that I know of, including Chinese, is such that every phoneme equals a single idea and only one idea. Instead, most phonemes do more than one thing and it takes one or more phonemes to make each morpheme, and one or more morphemes to make the larger lexical units, and then sentences, paragraphs, and so on. By the time you have a sufficient number of these strung together, you will find that all living languages can express all ideas, though some can express them more concisely.

Conciseness, brevity, and speed of expression that are due to the nature of the language itself and not to the skill of the individual speaker aren't automatically superior to slower, more thorough, or more elliptical expression. If that were true, literature would not exist.

Such built-in capability of brevity in a language also does not automatically make every speaker of that language somehow better than speakers of languages that take longer to render an idea. No, in all languages the maximum expression is achieved by those who have mastered the given language to its fullest and they, the best writers and the best speakers, are not necessarily those who use the fewest words, even across languages.

Xie xie (thx), Grant

In fact, the current one million English (include scientific words) words can be expressed by just few thousand words. There is a certain dictionary using 5,000 basic words to explain more than 100,000 entries. Suppose, whenever we need an entry of this dictionary, can we replace it by a few words from this 5,000 basic words? Yes we can, the only question is that the expression of this few words could be longer than the original word.
For instance we may replace ‘alto' by lowest-female-voice, replace ‘soprano' as highest-female-voice, and replace ‘tenor' as highest-male-voice etc. By these replacement some rarely used word can be know by the normal people, for instance rarely someone knows what is ‘prill', but once we replace it as high-grade-copper-ore, then every body know it. By this way, every English speaker can master a vocabulary of millions word during a short time. The only problem is such compound words are too long.
For this reason, we have to find out a method to make every basic word very short, and then their compound word could be short too. For instance, if we assign lo=lowest, fe=female and vo=voice, then the lowest-female-voice should be as short as lofevo.

Grant Barrett : “It doesn't matter at all how many sounds your language has. No natural language that I know of, including Chinese, is such that every phoneme equals a single idea and only one idea. Instead, most phonemes do more than one thing and it takes one or more phonemes to make each morpheme, and one or more morphemes to make the larger lexical units, and then sentences, paragraphs, and so on. By the time you have a sufficient number of these strung together, you will find that all living languages can express all ideas, though some can express them more concisely.”

I think a language have more sounds would get more benefit. What I said is ‘sound' neither phoneme nor syllable. A sound may be formed by either a single vowel or a mixture of a consonant and a vowel. A sound lasts roughly 0.25 second. That is to say within this time, everybody can send a clear message to a listener. If we can't use it properly, then we waste time.
An example is from playing card. We know the Chinese speaks a tone language, when a Chinese speaker asks his Chinese mate in English in front of you, “What is this?” as he picking up a playing card. In this case, you thought that gay want to know the card. But in fact the speaker told his friend what the card was already. As a Chinese can use four different tones to pronounce each syllables, he use “What1” telling his friend “This is spade.” “What2” telling his friend “This is heart.” and so on. Now let us check the second syllable in the sentence of “What is this?” It is ‘is'. It could also be pronounced in four different ways. We regard them as 1,2,3,4. Finally, the syllable “this” can be pronounced in four ways too. Then put ‘is' and ‘this' together it should be 1,1=1, 1,2=2, 1,3=3, 1,4=4, 2,1=5, 2,2=6, 2,3=7 and so on. By this way, the speaker tell hie friend the card is spade 9 or club 12 while a English speaker thought the first Chinese ask question to his friend.
From that example you may understand, in everyday speech, an English speaker at least wasted 3/4 information signals.

Grant Barrett : “Conciseness, brevity, and speed of expression that are due to the nature of the language itself and not to the skill of the individual speaker aren't automatically superior to slower, more thorough, or more elliptical expression. If that were true, literature would not exist.”

Structuralism believes that every language is in fact a changing system. So, once we know the trend, we can help a certain language to improve it expression system. As for the aesthetic of literature, it is also follow this rule. For instance, in Shakespeare' time, English had only 30,000 words, but now English has more than one million words, that is to say no one can meet a certain word as frequent as Shakespeare. In other word, no one can use a certain word as sophisticate as Shakespeare.

Grant Barrett : “Such built-in capability of brevity in a language also does not automatically make every speaker of that language somehow better than speakers of languages that take longer to render an idea. No, in all languages the maximum expression is achieved by those who have mastered the given language to its fullest and they, the best writers and the best speakers, are not necessarily those who use the fewest words, even across languages.”

I don't think a reform can be take place overnight, but if you don't want do something, then the problem is still there. Once we know the reason, I believe authors of English would solve the rest issue.