Redundancy--(in defense of "South Yugoslavia")

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:25 PM -0600 11/13/04, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
>    I'd like to speak out in defense of "South Yugoslavia." Sure,
>"Yug-" in Slavic means "South," but once the country Yugoslavia
>arose, one could be in the north, south, east, or west of that
>country.
>
>     But here's another (non-onomastic) item on redundancy. A much
>beloved professor of geology at my campus (Tom Beveridge; now
>deceased) used to travel around the state (Missouri) studying not
>only geology but also collecting anything else of interest that he
>came across.. He was particularly fond of collecting interesting
>signs. One, in a restaurant, was an advertisement to hire a "female
>waitress." Another of his favorite reodundancies was "an ink pen."
>I forget the rest. But (and here I'm just wondering out loud) how do
>these examples jibe with the supposed Law of Least Effort in
>language?
>
As a frequent defender (and exploiter) of the Law of Least Effort I
was going to point out that "ink pen" is likely to occur in areas
where "pen" and "pin" are neutralized, and thus the avoidance of
redundancy (and of synonymy) is going to be constrained by the
avoidance of homonymy when the context doesn't disambiguate.  (Cf.
Bloomfield and Bolinger on e.g. "light-colored" vs. "lightweight".)
The most extreme defenders of least effort-based principles in
language use and language change--Zipf, Martinet, etc.--were always
quite explicit about the fact that least effort does not operate
unchecked, or communication would consist of one word, presumably
pronounced [@], with infinitely many meanings.

"female waitress" does seem pretty redundant, but less so if you
don't parse -ess as [+ female].  Cf. German "Prinzessin", "Hindin"
[lit., 'female princess', 'female doe'], or of course Eng.
"children", with what are historically (but not transparently) three
different plural markers.

larry