Mohd Zaini Abd Razak read and liked Trevor's review of Words and Rules (Science Masters):

"I think I know how to tell if a book by Pinker is going to be a great read or an effort to get through - how thick it is. I've read most of his stuff, but this is my favourite - closely followed by The Language Instinct (which is also a great read)....more I think I know how to tell if a book by Pinker is going to be a great read or an effort to get through - how thick it is. I've read most of his stuff, but this is my favourite - closely followed by The Language Instinct (which is also a great read). How the Mind Works is quite a difficult, though probably worth it in the end, and The Blank Slate - well, I barely remember any of it now.

This is magnificent, particularly on how children learn language and how they make predictable mistakes in whatever language they are learning.

He really does write beautifully in this book, always with a clarity that is as sharp as a spotlight. This is a wonderful introduction to Chomsky and his linguistics.

Chomsky’s view can be summed up like this: how do kids learn a language at all. When we try to teach them we say things like “Oh, coo, coo, coochims, who’s a boopsie, woopsie, darlin’ angel?” Now, clearly, this is not the most obvious sort of instruction for learning grammatically correct sentences we could offer our children. So, how do kids ever manage it – given how crap we adults would seem to be at language instruction. The only thing that seems to make sense is that we don’t learn, but are born already knowing the key things they need to know about languages. Just as walking is something we have to learn, but also have a genetic predisposition towards, so it is the same with language.

This sounds like some sort of mystic rubbish the first time you hear the argument, how could we possibly be born knowing a language – particularly given there are so many different languages – but that isn’t really the point. The point is that kids learn all of these languages in similar ways and that all languages have remarkably similar features. A universal grammar.

I have problems with some aspects of this theory – and Pinker points out elsewhere that it does not fit at all with Chomsky’s social and political theories – but the fact kids have ‘sensitive periods’ when learning particular aspects of grammar either happen or don’t happen does seem to be a very strong confirmation of the innateness of language learning structures in the brain.

For the maths nut in me - being a boy I do like numbers and odd little statistics - if we end up knowing 40,000 words by the age of twelve that means from they day we are born we have had to learn eight words per day. Doesn't that just amaze you?

This is a much more accessible book than this review is turning out – Pinker at his best.
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