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.’”