This thought occurred to me while I was watching a Taiwanese movie - 逆光飛翔 (Touch of the Light). It's a movie based on true events of a blind person with an innate talent for music. It was the Taiwanese entry for the Best Foreign Movie Oscar. While watching the movie, I was using Mandarin subtitles. I was a bit nervous in the beginning wondering how much I would understand without relying on languages I am familiar with.
Redundancy in Information Theory in layman terms is the amount that could be subtracted from a given piece of information without actually affecting the data delivered to the recipient. Mandarin has fairly less amount of redundancy compared to English. It has no articles and you have to rely on the context to find out the tense. Actually, Mandarin is highly contextual in nature.
While watching the movie I was surprised by how naturally I could follow the course of events in the movie. The first half of the movie is not much predictable while the second half is the exact opposite. It's obvious that a predictable plot leads to redundancy in information. But I was amused even a mundane setting had a strong correlation with the words being spoken in the movie. Given a few keywords, expressions of the characters and an empirical approach to the movie plot, I had little difficulty following the movie.
Surprisingly, when I used to have conversations with people here in Mandarin a few months ago, even though I was well aware of the context and the subtleties in tone, I found it hard to follow the conversation I was part of. But why was it so easy to get in the flow of events of totally unrelated people in a plot totally unrelated to me?
The guess the answer lies in a few assumptions I think hold more or less true -
- The amount of people involved in usage of a language is directly proportional to contextual information which helps one make an educated guess about what the speaker is talking about. In a dialogue, there are only two people involved and there exists no prior knowledge about the subject. On the contrary side, the viewer is aware of the subject most of the time.
- Grammar is more or less a redundant concept. It doesn't help relay any additional information; rather it helps reduce the 'noise' or randomness in the information. A lot of Asian languages have minimal usage of Grammar compared to English, Hindi or a few romance languages. When watching a movie in a language you are not familiar with, one can easily catch the keywords and connect the dots without any need for scrutinizing the grammar. While having a dialogue, if you are a speaker you need to focus on the grammar part (if you wish to).
I believe the presence of redundancy mostly contributes to the beauty of a language. There are exceptions of course - one aspect of beauty in poetry is how minimal and terse it can be. It plays a big role in subjective evaluation of a language. If you consider language strictly as a mode of delivering data, the concepts of grammar and sentence structure assume little significance.
While reading a book written in Mandarin two days ago, I came across a section where the author narrated her experiences while living in Africa. It was only after an hour that I realized I couldn't figure which tense the author was narrating the story in - past or present. But from the contextual knowledge that she was talking about her past experiences, this knowledge wasn't even required.
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