THE SCHOOL, A SCHOOL, SCHOOL

In 1971 or so I made the not unimportant discovery that natural languages are structured like error correcting codes.

I was well prepared for the subject. I had learned English in England during WWII by listening to it just like you did in America. Then I worked my way through college by teaching English in a language school. The students (Czechs) would say "I have been in Prague yesterday" and "I go to the school to learn English," When I corrected them, they would ask "why?" and I would have no better answer than "Well that's the way you say it." But after class I would sneak to the grammar book and look up the reason. Czech has no articles (nor does any other Slavic language except Bulgarian), and to explain the difference between a school and the school is easy. But how about plain school? Yes, there is a rule, and nobody who has learned the language just by picking it up knows it: the article is omitted when you refer to something associated with the word rather than the word itself. That's why we go to school to learn, to church to pray, to bed to sleep, but the bus stops by a church and the lamp stands by the bed. Beginning to sound like an artificial criterion that is implemented to protect the message?

If not, let me give you more. Czechs think it strange to make a difference between "I smoke" and "I am smoking." Americans think it strange that when you do something in the Slavic languages, it is required to state whether the action was completed or not.

A statement consisting only of information morphemes is made by a child who does not yet speak the language: "Annie want milk." The s of wants is a check morpheme which is redundant as shown by the "defective" verbs can, must, may, ought, might which don't take an s in the third person.

The simple English sentence "The teacher stands by the blackboard" requires the gender of the teacher to be made known in French, German, Czech, Russian, and all Slavic languages. This is not because the scene is one of steamy sex, but another arbitrary criterion that these languages require to be answered—a check structure to protect the information. To the contrary, Hungarian has only a single word for he, she, it, showing how redundant gender is. (When you hear a foreigner say "Susan? He just went home," you can bet it is a Hungarian speaking.)

To test my claim, I wrote a computer program containing fewer than 100 unprocessed (and exchangeable) English words, from which it could make 10^28 grammatically correct, though of course not always meaningful, English sentences. By biasing the path at randomly thrown switches and loading the dictionary one could get sentences of various complexity and make the program talk, for example, like a learned lawyer. I also won $1 from a local radio station whose announcer said he could read any tongue twister without going wrong. I sent him two pages of computer-generated tongue-twisters.