The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick

In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Neither Kele nor English yet had words to say, allocate extra bits for disambiguation and error correction. Yet this is what the drum language did. Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.