Comment by dapperdrake
4 months ago
Perl and line noise also share these properties. Don’t particularly want to read straight binary zip files in a hex editor, though.
Human language has roughly, say, 36% encoding redundancy on purpose. (Or by Darwinian selection so ruthless we might as well call it "purpose".)
> 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.
> 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.
Language is often consciously changed and learned, so it is sometimes quite designed.