Redundancy (language)

A run can mean anything from a jog to a tear in a stocking to scoring a point in baseball, a hit anything from a smack to a best-selling tune. When I say "I'll give you a ring tomorrow," am I promising a gift of jewelry or just a phone call? Even little words can be ambiguous; as Bill Clinton famously said, "It all depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." Meanwhile, even when the individual words are clear, sentences as a whole may not be: does Put the hook on the towel on the table mean that there is a book on the towel that ought to be on the table or that a book, which ought to be on a towel, is already on the table? Even in languages like Latin, which might — for all its cases and word endings — seem more systematic, ambiguities still crop up. For instance, because the subject of a verb can be left out, the third-person singular verb Amat can stand on its own as a complete sentence — but it might mean "He loves," "She loves," or "It loves." As the fourth-century philosopher Augustine, author of one of the first essays on the topic of ambiguity, put it, in an essay written in the allegedly precise language of Latin, the "perplexity of ambiguity grows like wild flowers into infinity." And language falls short on our other criteria too. Take redundancy ...»