Re: Universal grammar


LEE Sau Dan wrote:

If there is no redandency in natrual lnaguages, then how come we can
do erorr-corrcetoin?

The mistakes in your sentence illustrate your point, so they are
necessary, and there is no redundancy. Language works on many
levels. Mistakes can be Freudian slips / indicate stress / tell me
that an author is upset / no native speaker of English / not knowing
what he or she talks about / overwhelmed by an idea and writing
very quickly in order to capture his or her notion, not caring for
orthography / Mark Twain, who loved dialects and wrote that
nobody got so little phantasy that he can write a word only one
way / furthermore, mistakes testify to the shifting tendency of
language. Redundancy only occurs when you ignore one or
another level of information. Leonardo da Vinci repeated himself
in his writings. He noted many times that only the central "ray"
of vision is strong and truthful, all others are weak and untruthful
(debole e bugiarde). Every time he used different words, while
saying the same. I found the lines in seven different manuscripts.
Many of Leonardo's manuscripts are lost. He might have written
the same notion - the very key to the understanding of his Mona
Lisa painting - on still more sheets, considering that some of
his manuscripts may go lost, ensuring that his insight survives.
When you consider time, destroyer of all things (Leonardo),
the redundancy vanishes. - I like the legacy by Stephen Jay
Gould: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Others complain
about the redundancy of that voluminous book. Gould says the
same time and again. I for one like being remembered of the
crucial ideas while reading, and the sheer number of repetitions -
especially of his mantra "stasis is data" - informs me that these
three words are the key statement. Very reader-friendly. When
I read the more than 1,400 pages I might just keep these three
words in mind, stasis is data, and everything comes back.
I can remember and reconstruct the book in my mind starting
from these three words. Redundancy only occurs when one
ignores the pedagogical and epistemiological intentions of
the author. So I agree on Rob Freeman's at first surprising
statement that language is already incompressible.

Regards Franz Gnaedinger

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