[boomlinde]

A quick test using a non-lossy compressor with no understanding of phonemes or human language and grammatical context at all on a dictionary of 370000 English words resulted in 24 bits per word here. It wouldn't surprise me if our abilities to roughly contextualize language in terms of the language we already understand gives us a serious advantage here.

Now a few questions: Can you hear a word you've never written (in a language that you're familiar with) and intuitively spell it right the first time? Can you read a word that you don't immediately understand and figure out its meaning from the context in which it is used? Can you accurately complete half of a sentence?

That a lot of people can do these things suggests to me that we all sit on something superficially similar to an efficient lossy compressor in our brain.