Minimality of Natural Language

William Woods postulated that natural language evolved because humans needed to communicate complex concepts over a bandwidth-limited serial channel, i.e. speech.

All of our communication methods are serial:

• a small number of basic symbols (characters, phonemes)
• basic symbols are combined into words
• words are combined into phrases and sentences.

Claude Shannon's information theory deals with transmission of information with the smallest possible number of bits. Likewise, natural language is strongly biased toward minimality:

• Never say something the listener already knows.
• Omit things that can be inferred.
• Eliminate redundancy.
• Shorten!