>>11203917>Also, I don't see why there should be this distinction between speakers and listeners, why should it be advantageous to the listener but not the speakers, and why should it be advantageous at all?Zipf called it principle of least effort. I think the idea is that if I am the speaker, I'd prefer to *convey* the message using as little effort on my part as possible, whereas if I am the listener, I'd like to receive/ interpret the message with minimal effort. I don't know what this means quantitatively. I also dont know how seriously its taken in modern linguistics departments
If I'm thinking in terms of codes, which language ultimately is, then I can imagine that encoding != decoding (in terms of effort in encoding vs decoding)
>i.e. you are supposed to analyze the phonology such that the amount of phonemes is minimizedI think I understand how one would apply this to phonemes now: this is just maximizing entropy. As a speaker of some language, I effectively have an alphabet of sounds available to me (as you posted in OP). Clearly, increasing the size of the alphabet increases our capacity per phoneme. Also, the entropy per symbol is maximized if there is a uniform distribution of phonemes
Redundancy is only vital for communication in the context of noise, which happens whenever you ask e.g a quiet person, or a person with an accent to repeat themselves (there is some kind of "noise" on the phonemes). In this case its just a repetition code if you are being cute
