Thoughts on language.

I am distracted by having to write a 6000 word essay that is supposed to be good. We'll see. As I work through the mountain of academic writing I have had to think through my own perspective on language and communication. I promise never to write anything this serious in a blog ever again, except that there is a similar understanding of theory of mind and Asperger's to be explored at some point.

Claude Shannon published a scientific paper in 1948 called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The principals outlined, and the mathematical proofs demonstrated by Shannon in the early 1940s provided the foundation of the major communication developments in the second half of the 20^th Century. It was the scientific step that enabled the digital age. Shannon’s key discovery was that information is lost into the background noise and categorical ambiguity by exactly the same set of mathematical rules that govern the loss of energy in the process of entropy.  

We live in a world in which entropy must always increase and the amount of available energy in the universe will constantly, irreversibly diminish. That is an iron law of nature. Yet at the same time in our everyday lives we do allow the law of the conservation of energy. In standard practical physics calculations of energy, mass and temperature need take no account of empirically tiny amounts of entropy. Shannon demonstrated that the same was true for information. In any communication system there was a threshold below which the effects of information entropy could be ignored. Below a certain rate of communication,  usually expressed in bits per second, a means of communication could be found that was effectively error free. Above this rate errors were inevitable and would increase exponentially, and without bound, as the communication rate went up. Shannon was the first person to realise that it should be possible to send a billion bits of date to the moon, and have them bounce back, and on their return find that that not a single bit had been lost. The key to this was the understanding the only upper limit on error free communication was speed.

It is the common assumption that we can communicate exactly what we want to another individual and that if individual cannot understand our normal speech and read out standard shared writing, they have something wrong with them. Shannon’s work suggests that, provided it is only their communication ability that is impaired, then there should exist a communication paradigm such that they can communicate normally but more slowly. (In these terms a smaller vocab would be "slower")

Theorem:

There exists a language paradigm for any setting such that no individual will be disadvantaged for reasons of communication alone.

In communication disorders such as dyslexia, SLI, and pragmatic impairment disorder, auditory and cognitive function are expected to be normal.  In a rigorous application of the science of communication one would expect these disorders to be the consequence a communication rate that was too high for the individual concerned at their particular state of development and general ability. If the communication paradigm were changed these communication breakdowns should disappear and be replaced by (simpler and slower) error free communication. What many young boys  discover, is that as soon as they can get out of school and into the Army, or into a building site, or factory, or more problematically, into a gang then they no longer feel disadvantaged by language.