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by smsm42 4331 days ago
Language should not be concise. Redundancy is built into the language for a reason - language communication is extremely noisy and if there's two-bit-error distance between "I love you" and "I killed and ate your dog" then the usage of this language by humans would not be comfortable.

Moreover, people communicating are imperfect. So if you have a language which is very precise and concise, you would have to spend a lot of effort to find a word or set of words which exactly expresses your meaning (in programming, we call it design when we do it upfront, and debugging when we do it post factum) and communication would be a very complex exercise. However, if you have a lot of words which mean roughly the same, you can be sure the meaning is passed through even if the words are not chosen super-carefully.
3 comments
laichzeit0 4331 days ago
In some languages the meaning of a word is highly dependent on the pitch accent, like ancient Greek. If you're 1 bit off you have trouble :) Surprising enough I read an example of this yesterday evening:

"Hegelochus, the actor in Euripides' Orestes, which was presented in 408 BC, in line 279 of the play, instead of "after the storm I see again a calm sea" (galeén' horoo), Hegelochus recited "after the storm I see again a weasel" (galeên horoo)."

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legutierr 4330 days ago
One of the most famous passages from the Bible seems to have have been affected by (or benefited from) a similar ambiguity.

Mark 10:25 (and parallel versions in Matthew and Luke) has prompted much speculation over the centuries with regards to the origin of it's evocative metaphor: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

But when you consider that the word for camel (kamêlos) and for rope (kamilos) differ by only one vowel, quite a mundane explanation springs to mind: someone in the early church misheard, misspelled, or mistranslated Jesus' original admonition.

The more satisfying explanation, the one that I prefer, is that this is a pun that happens to have gotten lost in translation.

The few comments in this blog article offer some interesting explanations:

http://rambambashi.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/common-errors-36...

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estebank 4331 days ago
Case in point, the Turkish I problem has had tragic consequences: http://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two...
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smsm42 4325 days ago
Having to deal in the past with the code broken due to Turkish having two i's and weird case conversion rules (for both i and I, case change goes to the other letter which is not present in ASCII) I can only be happy it didn't come to these proportions.
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RVuRnvbM2e 4331 days ago
It's hard to overstate the importance of redundancy in natural languages.

This is the whole reason we are able to make ourselves understood in a noisy, imprecise world. Even if you miss a few syllables - or even half a sentence, you can usually piece together what the other person was trying to say.

Imagine someone technology-illiterate trying to describe a problem they're having with their computer in this language. Impossible.

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microtonal 4331 days ago
It's hard to overstate the importance of redundancy in natural languages.

There are other factors at play, such that speech perception is multi-modal. E.g. see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect

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