No it really can't. It's somewhat hard to explain without going hard into grammar but if someone tried complex communication in English, how you would in Korean, communication would break down very quickly.

In Korean, Plural markers basically don't exist, Articles don't exist and possessive determiners are very few and only typically inserted when determining the meaning would be difficult otherwise.

Strictly speaking 친구 있어요 ? means Friend Have ?

And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents

"Do they have friends ?"

"Do you have a friend ?"

"Do you have friends ?"

"Does he have a friend ?"

And so on.

If you wanted to say,

"I have a friend"

"He has friends"

"They have a friend" etc, you'd simply remove the question mark and change the tone of the last syllable (when speaking).

친구 있어요.

The exact meaning would have to be divided from surrounding context.

Lots of composability that simply doesn't exist in English.

Similar story in Japanese, which is also high-context and encodes less information explicitly. Listeners have to do more interpretation using context than in English, since sentences out of context can mean more things.

Hold up, if information is being encoded on tone, and tonal marks aren't part of the written language, then you've at least somewhat bait and switched us. Its not literally one identical phrase for 4 situations. Its several slightly different phrases that happen to not have their difference transcribed within this writing system. The information is still there!

It's not tone - at least not in the same sense Chinese is a tonal language. Standard Korean does not have tones. Maybe a better term would be intonation: it's similar to how the same English sentence could have multiple meanings, e.g., "I certainly did not see him" vs. "I certainly did not see him."

GP's example sentence would have just two different way to say it, either a plain statement or a question. In either case the pronoun is omitted, so you're supposed to infer it from context.

The great irony here is that the one time I truly started to understand Chinese tones was when it was explained in terms of how English speakers already subconsciously use tones. I think I get what you mean. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Like English, Korean uses tones as a channel for metadata, not as a direct part of the encoding set. You can annotate parts of the sentence with tones, such as marking something a question or highlighting certain information as important, but you can't wholesale change whats being said.

Yes. Older forms of Korean were either tonal or had a pitch accent like Japanese or Swedish, and the original form of hangeul included accent marks. Some dialects of Korean still have a pitch accent.

tone i guess isn't quite right. not in the chinese sense anyway. it's more stress. stress and intonation. it will be different for the last syllable.

Curious how your definition of efficiency is somehow "by not encoding information about the subject, such as their relation or plurality, we are able to use less words than a language that does encode that information".

It's not an equal comparison matey

it's more that such information about the subject and whatever else is not stated until necessary and not more times than necessary.

If a mother were talking to the counsellor in school about her son's performance in school, and she suddenly asked 친구 있어요 ?, then she's almost certainly asking "Does he have friends?" and so on. If she happens to not be speaking about her son for whatever reason, she can make that known too by adding an extra word. Point is that it happens only when it needs to.

In English, Pulling up a "Friend Have?" will get a mark of confusion no matter the surrounding context. English doesn't prime you to expect information conveyed in such a manner.

also, i'm not op