The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language in Science and Inquiry

Nov 02, 2017 Petra X rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 10-star-books, 2017-read, 2017-100-reviews, misc-reference, reviewed

In my bookshop are lots of books like, 'First 100 Words' and "ABC with pictures", you know those sort of books. We talk to our babies in 'motherese' and we point to things and name them, but we do not teach our babies grammar. We say things like 'look at those puppies there, they are much smaller than these ones here'. We don't explain when to use words like 'those' or 'these' or 'there' and 'here' and where we put them in a sentence.

We don't need to, Pinker says, Chomsky said, that grammar is In my bookshop are lots of books like, 'First 100 Words' and "ABC with pictures", you know those sort of books. We talk to our babies in 'motherese' and we point to things and name them, but we do not teach our babies grammar. We say things like 'look at those puppies there, they are much smaller than these ones here'. We don't explain when to use words like 'those' or 'these' or 'there' and 'here' and where we put them in a sentence.

We don't need to, Pinker says, Chomsky said, that grammar is built-in. That no matter what language a child learns, they will use the words grammatically without any instruction. And if a child learns wildly different languages as say Welsh, Spanish and English (there are many people who grow up speaking these particular three in Patagonia) they will use the correct grammar as well as words without any difficulty at all.
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Notes on reading: What I've learned so far: that it takes only one generation to turn a pidgin into a creole (language). Immigrant workers in Hawaii, Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans even Portuguese and Europeans spoke to each other in pidgin. Pidgin is a collection of words without any grammar. It's a bit like what most of us who are not linguistically-gifted speak when we travel. We mix the few words we know of the local language with English and (if British) shouted loudly and repetitively until the 'native' gets it.

The children of the immigrant workers were looked after together when their parents were in the fields and they, just like that, because of the instinct for language, for grammar, turned the pidgin into a creole, a language that could express anything and everything. Children never speak pidgin, their brains impose structure on words and they learn from each other. Sadly, the window for language acquisition closes as puberty approaches. After that it is only talented individuals who can acquire a foreign language with perfect grammar and accent.

Jamaican, which Jamaicans continually put down as the patois of the poor people', not proper 'standard English' is in fact a proper language with its own grammar, although a majority of the words are derived from English and Akan,

Pinker says he's not 100% behind Chomsky's theories. He's pretty close though. I got bored with the chapters on Chomsky's language trees, I'm more interested in how we produce language than the structure of it.

Great book, a difficult and academic read (at least to me) and boring in bits too but none of that takes away from opening up a new skein of thought for me, and I enjoy that more than anything else from a book. ...more

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Dec 21, 2008 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: linguistics, psychology, science, nonfiction

Previously, I had read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought", which is also an excellent book. I enjoyed that book, so I next read this one--and I'm glad I did. "The Language Instinct" is an absolutely fascinating book! The author presents some very convincing arguments, that the acquisition of language is an instinct that has evolved over many generations, through natural selection. Steven Pinker is right on the money, when it comes to his analysis of evolution. Every chapter is compelling, an ...more

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Sep 16, 2019 bup rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, consciousness, linguistics, 2019, animal-minds

I think this took me long enough.

In my defense, I'm kind of stupid.

So he's convinced me that humans have a language instinct. And it's not arrogant, it's just objective observation in the same way that one might observe that bees have an instinct for understanding waggle dances.

I also like all the take downs of prescriptive grammarians who think knowing about splitting infinitives and ending sentences in prepositions makes them better than everyone else, because I'm petty and insecure, so I can' I think this took me long enough.

In my defense, I'm kind of stupid.

So he's convinced me that humans have a language instinct. And it's not arrogant, it's just objective observation in the same way that one might observe that bees have an instinct for understanding waggle dances.

I also like all the take downs of prescriptive grammarians who think knowing about splitting infinitives and ending sentences in prepositions makes them better than everyone else, because I'm petty and insecure, so I can't wait until my brother corrects me for saying "everyone got their dinner," and when he says "his or her dinner," asking him to correct, "I served everyone dinner before you even seated them."

My one teensy-weensy niggle, and it's more in the spirit of science - when someone lifts their hypothesis up, anyone and everyone is duty-bound to take shots at it - is that while I agree he showed humans have a language instinct, I feel like he also claimed no other animals do. And his discussion of that is that we look at chimpanzees and bonobos, expecting to find similarities in everything, even though our most recent common ancestor is maybe ~7mya. He compares it to elephants with their incredibly talented noses looking tirelessly for similar rudimentary talents in tapirs or whatever extant animal elephants are most closely related to.

What's the problem? Nobody said that because the most closely related living animal doesn't have it, you're unique. Alex, that damned bird, understood a thing or two, and his most recent common ancestor with us lived in the Triassic or late Permian. I'll grant it's nothing like our complexity, but noun plus verb = grammar. And adjectives tied to nouns are noun phrases. What that animal was doing revealed something going on in his mind that could map sound labels to meaning in groups. That's language. Or proto-language. Or something. I mean, he was constructing original combinations to get what was inside his brain into somebody else's!

So debunking Koko (I yield to Pinker, because I honestly don't know enough about Koko's signing to know if the many skeptics or the many believers were right) doesn't disprove non-human language. Granted, it's easy to take the non-falsifiable position that "nobody has shown non-human language doesn't exist," so I will take the slightly more falsifiable position that at least some birds can apply abstract labels to meaning in noun and verb combinations. That crosses the threshold for language, IMO.

And I think it makes sense, evolutionarily, since bird calls apparently accomplish a lot in a bird's life. Species identification, individual identification, tribal identification, alarms, etc.

Omigod. Dinosaurs can talk. ...more

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Oct 24, 2010 Erica marked it as to-read

Shelves: did-not-finish-yet, language

I read about half of this book, but just didn't have the mental stamina to finish it right now. Language really interests me, but being interrupted every five minutes by a five year old makes it so hard to read lately. The writing was pretty dense; I'd like a little more pedestrian overview of this book. ...more

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