Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

Every human language falls short of this sort of perfection. Russell was probably wrong in his first point — it's actually quite handy (logical, even) for a language to allow for the household pet to be referred to as Fido, a dog, a poodle, a mammal, and an animal — but right in thinking that in an ideal language, words would be systematically related in meaning and in sound. But this is distinctly not the case. The words jaguar, panther, ocelot, and puma, for example, sound totally different, yet all refer to felines, while hardly any of the words that sound like cat — cattle, catapult, catastrophe — have any connection to cats.

Meanwhile, in some cases language seems redundant (couch and sofa mean just about the same thing), and in others, incomplete (for example, no language can truly do justice to the subtleties of what we can smell). Other thoughts that seem perfectly coherent can be surprisingly difficult to express; the sentence Whom do you think that

* Forgive me if I leave poetry out of this. Miscommunication can be a source of mirth, and ambiguity may enrich mysticism and literature. But in both cases, it's likely that we're making the best of an imperfection, not exploiting traits specifically shaped by their adaptive value.

John left? (where the answer is, say, Mary, his first wife) is grammatical, but the ostensibly similar Whom do you think that left Mary? (where the answer would be John) is not. (A number of linguists have tried to explain this phenomenon, but it's hard to understand why this asymmetry should exist at all; there's no real analogy in mathematics or computer languages.)

Ambiguity, meanwhile, seems to be the rule rather than the exception. 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. From the perspective of maximizing communication relative to effort, it would make little sense to repeat ourselves. Yet English is full of redundancies. We have "pleonasms" like null and void, cease and desist, and for all intents and purposes, and pointless redundancies like advance planning. And then there's the third-person singular suffix -s, which we use only when we can already tell from the subject

Language