Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nlitened 240 days ago
> Human language has roughly, say, 36% encoding redundancy on purpose.

The purpose is being understandable by a person of average intellect and no specialized training. Compare with redundancy in math notation, for example.

1 comments

> The purpose is being understandable by a person of average intellect and no specialized training.

The purpose probably is keeping human speech understandable through the often noise-filled channel of ambient sound. Human speech with no redundancy would have a hard time fighting the noise floor.