All languages must have means for marking the syntactic roles of the words in a sentence.

The roles may be marked with prepositions or postpositions in isolating languages, or with declensions in fusional languages, or there may be no explicit markers when the word order is fixed (i.e. the same distinction as between positional arguments and arguments marked by keywords, in programming languages). The most laconic method for both programming languages and natural languages is to have a default word order where role markers are omitted, but to also allow any other word order if role markers are present.

Besides the mandatory means for marking syntactic roles, many languages have features that add redundancy without being necessary for understanding, i.e. which repeat already known information, for instance by repeating the information about gender and number that is attached to a noun also besides all its attributes. Whether a language requires redundancy or not is independent on whether it is an isolating language or a fusional language.

English has somewhat less syntactic role markers than other languages because it has a rigid word order, but for the other roles than the most frequent roles (agent, patient, beneficiary) it has a lot of prepositions.

Despite being more economic in role markers, English also has many redundant words that could be omitted, e.g. subjects or copulative verbs that are omitted in many languages. Thus for English it is possible to speak "like a caveman" without losing much information, but this is independent of the fact that modern English is a mostly isolating language with few remnants of its old declensions.

> One half interesting / half depressing observation I made is that at my workplace any meeting recording I tried to transcribe in this way had its length reduced to almost 2/3 when cutting off the silence. Makes you think about the efficiency (or lack of it) of holding long(ish) meetings.