[ihateolives]

> Esperanto also does away with a lot of redundancies, like grammatical gender, or arbitrary groups of verbs with distinct conjugation schemes. On its surface that's a good thing. It makes it easier to memorise the rules. However, it also makes the language more fragile as a medium of communication, or less noise resistant.

My L1 has no grammatical gender and word order is free and we still can parse our sentences fine without those checksums and certainly is not "fragile". To my brain grammatical gender is noise.

[nequo]

I agree that grammatical gender is not nearly universal.[1]

Does your L1 contain other sources of redundancy that can be used for error correction?

[1] An interesting paper on some of the correlates of languages with grammatical gender: https://unbound.williams.edu/facultypublications/islandora/o...

[ihateolives]

> Does your L1 contain other sources of redundancy that can be used for error correction?

Never looked at it from this angle. I guess the extensive case system for example, which allows to omit agent noun since the information is contained in the verb, but in reality is rarely omitted.

[Longlius]

Yes, case systems are an example of this. Most Indo-European languages use some combination of fixed word-order, noun classes (aka gender), and case systems to compensate for errors in communication.

English for example has a relatively strict word order.

Keep in mind that linguistic drift was a much stronger force in the past than it is today and being able to infer meaning through some incomprehensible input was a very important feature for languages to have.

>I guess the extensive case system for example, which allows to omit agent noun since the information is contained in the verb, but in reality is rarely omitted.

Is this just in the written form or also when spoken? Spoken language is much more susceptible to comprehension errors.

[whoooooo123]

What's your L1?