The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

As in every other case, the language spoken by Leahy’s hosts turned out to be no mere jabber but a medium that could express abstract concepts, invisible entities, and complex trains of reasoning. The highlanders conferred intensively, trying to agree upon the nature of the pallid apparitions. The leading conjecture was that they were reincarnated ancestors or other spirits in human form, perhaps ones that turned back into skeletons at night. They agreed upon an empirical test that would settle the matter. “One of the people hid,” recalls the highlander Kirupano Eza’e, “and watched them going to excrete. He came back and said, ‘Those men from heaven went to excrete over there.’ Once they had left many men went to take a look. When they saw that it smelt bad, they said, ‘Their skin might be different, but their shit smells bad like ours.’”

The comedian Dick Gregory tells of walking up to a lunch counter in Mississippi during the days of racial segregation. The waitress said to him, “We don’t serve colored people.” “That’s fine,” he replied, “I don’t eat colored people. I’d like a piece of chicken.”

dyslexia, a presumed congenital difficulty in learning to read even with sufficient

Perhaps some of the things about language that we have to learn are easily learned by simple mechanisms that antedated the evolution of grammar. For example, a simple kind of learning circuit might suffice to record which element comes before which other one, as long as the elements are first defined and identified by some other cognitive module. If a universal grammar module defines a head and a role-player, their relative ordering (head-first or head-last) could thus be recorded easily. If so, evolution, having made the basic computational units of language innate, may have seen no need to replace every bit of learned information with innate wiring. Computer simulations of evolution show that the pressure to replace learned neural connections with innate ones diminishes as more and more of the network becomes innate, because it becomes less and less likely that learning will fail for the rest.

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And by this criterion it is the nonstandard dialects that are superior, because they provide their speakers with second person plural pronouns like y’all and youse, and Standard English does not.

Y'all

Frequently

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