> DD,

Language is full of redundancy for the reason that you give, namely, that
utterance has to survive a great deal of chance interference, what you
nicely term 'static' -- the sounds of nature (rain, wind, waves), distance,
the difficulties of gaining and holding attention, especially in moments of
concentration on something else (say, the animal one wished to capture, the
enemy in battle you wish to overcome), actual deafness and partial deafness,
not seeing one's interlocutor's mouth, talking in candlelight and in the
dark,  etc., etc.  Perhaps this is why primitive languages were so full of
it, with elaborate inflections and gender matchings turning up right across
the sentence.

However, it seems as if redundancy is being slowly eroded.  It is very
noticeable in Britain that subject-verb agreements are more and more
neglected ('The complaints from the public over this matter is growing
daily').  You can usually pick one out one or more of these in the morning
radio news discussion programmes.  Why say 'actress' when 'actor' will do,
particularly when it falls in with our notions of gender equality?  Perhaps
the decline in the interference of natural sounds, the frequent use of
microphones in public meetings, sermons, musical shows, and the like, our
familiarity with radio and television, as well as the spread of written
communication, are/is making redundancy redundant.

Edmond


Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
Cambridge
CB4 1DU
England

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Website: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/elw33/
Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256




> DD: I admire your caution. We should not ignore Shannon's work from
> Bell Lab on Information Theory and the transmission of messages.
> Rather than being static, redundancy helps insure that the message
> gets through the static.
> 
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