wickedcoolthoughts
Monday, December 10, 2007
  Redundancy of Language
"Couple of boys are riding their bikes!"

How many words in the above sentence tell you the presence of more than one person?
 
Comments:
couple boys bikes
 
couple boys their bikes
 
Taken alone, only "boys" and arguably "their", since everything else _could_ be referring to non-persons if "boys" was replaced (replace "boys" with "robots" and there are no persons present). "Their" also implies multiple people if we assume only people can possess property (although we kind of need bikes or some other property--flies clean _their_ legs, but flies aren't people)

However, assuming that whatever replaces "boys" will be some sort of people, "Couple" "boys" "are" and "their" are definitely in. If we actually understand the meaning of the sentence AND assume that one person can only ride one bike, "bikes" SORT OF works, but is pretty weak.

It's actually a rather difficult problem.
 
Thanks Nathan.

Rather than the boys or robots the focus is on multiplicity.
 
Of course redundancy is a good thing for natural language. Noisy channels and all that :-)
 
Redundancy is not considered good for a programming language. With the move of programming languages towards natural language(DSL etc), I am wondering how will redundancy be treated.
 
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I am passionate about making Better Software Solutions,that helps businesses to stay agile, by applying Agile,Lean and Systems Thinking principles. Also I grow coffee,spices and in general has big interest in pesticide free food!

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