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From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Re: Esperanto
Message-ID: <donhCwozqx.3oH@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <9409141217.AA05943@dacws2> <60.18539.4267.0N1AFE09@canrem.com> <35tm83$hlq@lsi.lsil.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 1994 15:44:55 GMT
Lines: 53

pgf@lsil.com (Paul Filseth) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <35tm83$hlq@lsi.lsil.com>:
>peter.hansen@canrem.com (Peter Hansen) wrote:
>>martin%dacws2%dac.isei.jrc.it@cen.jrc.it (Martin) wrote:

>> >  The high degree of redundancy which is a consequence of
>> >  the fact that the 16 Grammar must not permit any exceptions.
>> >  Esperanto seems to require a better signal-to-noise
>> >  ratio than other languages to be intelligible

>>These two statements are mutually exclusive.  A high degree of
>>redundancy means the information should survive transmission through a
>>noisy channel...
>
>There is no contradiction between the two statements.  Redundancy is
>indeed the raw material from which surviving noisy transmission is
>constructed, but it can be used inefficiently.  A good error correcting
>code adds log(N) bits to an N-bit message and gives you more protection
>from noise than repeating the entire message would, although the latter
>is far more redundant.  It sounds like Esperanto uses its redundancy
>less effectively than other languages do (but since I don't speak any
>Esperanto, this is speculation.)

The question of redundancy in Esperanto goes back to (at least) an article 
by, I believe, John Francis in 1960. Frankly, I am not sure whether 
Esperanto is any more (or any less) redundant than other languages. 
Usually, questions of redundancy come down to adjective agreement, in 
which Esperanto adjectives are required to have the same endings as 
the nouns the modify (the total number of endings in question are two -- 
-J for plural and -N for direct object). To an English-speaker, this 
looks like redundancy since, obviously, an adjective is already shown by 
its position, immediately before the noun it modifies. The adjective 
endings in Esperanto are far less redundant, since there is no rule 
about position, and, indeed, the adjective may be separated from the 
noun by other words (though this is much more common in poetry than in 
ordinary prose or speech).

It is not clear to me that adherence to the sixteen rules represents 
redundancy. As far as I can tell, most or all languages have a set of 
rules to which speakers adhere, usually unconsciously. The rules may be 
more numerous, and less well-described in the literature, but they are 
there...

Real redundancy is found in (European, at least) languages in which the 
person of a verb is shown both by the verb ending and by the accompanying 
pronoun. I've noticed that in some such languages the pronoun tends to 
disappear after a while ... or (as in English) the endings tend to 
disappear...

-- 
Don HARLOW			donh@netcom.com
Esperanto League for N.A.       elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/elna/elna.html         Esperanto
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/donh/donh.html 
