Checksum

Started: 2004-06-03 15:58:29

Submitted: 2004-06-03 16:06:46

Visibility: World-readable

I had a bizarre idea not that long ago -- what if spoken languages included a checksum in each sentence so that the recipient would know when she didn't properly parse the sentence or it was garbled in transmission? The language would define some algorithm that a human could easily perform to create a checksum on every sentence. Small children (and non-native speakers) would learn the checksum algorithm as they learned the language itself. The rest of the world would think the language bizarre, but native speakers would know better.