True, but that's mostly a matter of having more things they can say in one word. Reducing ambiguity in a language by splitting the job of one word up among multiple words with fewer meanings increases the language's vocabulary size but doesn't increase the range of things there are words for. So the two aren't parallel.
Focusing on the numbers of words might miss my point. The average person who finishes speaks English on a higher level than the average person at high school. It takes effort to learn college level English.
If you make the language easier to learn than it will take less effort to learn college level English. People will reach the same level of proficiency in the language at an ealier age.
I'm working on a conlang (constructed language) and would like some input from the Less Wrong community. One of the goals is to investigate the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding language affecting cognition. Does anyone here have any ideas regarding linguistic mechanisms that would encourage more rational thinking, apart from those that are present in the oft-discussed conlangs e-prime, loglan, and its offshoot lojban? Or perhaps mechanisms that are used in one of those conlangs, but might be buried too deeply for a person such as myself, who only has superficial knowledge about them, to have recognized? Any input is welcomed, from other conlangs to crazy ideas.