The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called a creole.

The children used the sign of pointing to their conversational partners to mean “me” at exactly the age at which hearing children use the spoken sound you to mean “me.” The children were treating the gesture as a pure linguistic symbol; the fact that it pointed somewhere did not register as being relevant.

Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat. The problems Mother Nature faced are digital-to-analog conversion when the talker encodes strings of discrete symbols into a continuous stream of sound, and analog-to-digital conversion when the listener decodes continuous speech back into discrete symbols.

Dorothy Parker once replied to a question about why she had not been at the symphony lately by saying “I’ve been too fucking busy and vice versa.”

genius

Of course English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear.

For example, we can now differentiate words like waver and wafer, but King Ethelbuld could not have.

bombardment by electronic media, which Krauss calls “cultural nerve gas.”

All bilaterally symmetrical invertebrates (worms, insects, and so on) have the more straightforward arrangement in which the left side of the central nervous system controls the left side of the body and the right side controls the right side.

In support of the theory, Kinsbourne notes that invertebrates have their main neural cables laid along their bellies and their hearts in their backs, whereas chordates have their neural cables laid along their backs and their hearts in their chests. This is exactly what one would expect from a 180-degree head-to-body turn in the transition from one group to the other, and Kinsbourne could not find any reports of an animal that has only one or two out of the three reversals

“Analogous” traits are ones that have a common function but arose on different branches of the evolutionary tree and are in an important sense not “the same” organ.

“Homologous” traits, in contrast, may or may not have a common function, but they descended from a common ancestor and hence have some common structure that bespeaks their being “the same” organ.

J.B.S. Haldane once said that there are two reasons why humans do not turn into angels: moral imperfection and a body plan that cannot accommodate both arms and wings.

The concept of shibboleth (Hebrew for “torrent”) comes from the Bible: And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of the Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. (Judges 12:5–6)

A compound is pronounced with one stress pattern (dárkroom) and a phrase is pronounced with another (dark róom).