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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
In the movie Animal Crackers, Groucho Marx says, “I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Lol!
Chomsky suggests that the unordered super-rules (principles) are universal and innate, and that when children learn a particular language, they do not have to learn a long list of rules, because they were born knowing the super-rules.
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.”
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.
All speech is an illusion.
In the 1970s the guitarist Peter Frampton funneled the amplified sound of his electric guitar through a tube into his mouth, allowing him to articulate his twangings. The effect was good for a couple of hit records before he sank into rock-and-roll oblivion.
The interesting thing about mondegreens is that the mishearings are generally less plausible than the intended lyrics.
They forgot "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."
Learning is an option, like camouflage or horns, that nature gives organisms as needed—when some aspect of the organisms’ environmental niche is so unpredictable that anticipation of its contingencies cannot be wired in.
Languages are perpetuated by the children who learn them. When linguists see a language spoken only by adults, they know it is doomed.
The linguist Michael Krauss estimates that 150 North American Indian languages, about 80% of the existing ones, are moribund.
Sad.
Why should people care about endangered languages? For linguistics and the sciences of mind and brain that encompass it, linguistic diversity shows us the scope and limits of the language instinct.
“The loss of a language is part of the more general loss being suffered by the world, the loss of diversity in all things.”
BABY BORN TALKING—DESCRIBES HEAVEN Incredible proof of reincarnation The last headline caught my eye—it seemed like the ultimate demonstration that language is innate. According to the article, Life in heaven is grand, a baby told an astounded obstetrical team seconds after birth. Tiny Naomi Montefusco literally came into the world singing the praises of God’s firmament. The miracle so shocked the delivery room team, one nurse ran screaming down the hall. “Heaven is a beautiful place, so warm and so serene,” Naomi said. “Why did you bring me here?” Among the witnesses was mother Theresa
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Saved for Peyton.
Perhaps not. Complicated machines take time to assemble, and human infants may be expelled from the womb before their brains are complete.
Everyone knows that it is much more difficult to learn a second language in adulthood than a first language in childhood.
Damn right!
“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
Even if there is some utility to our learning a second language as adults, the critical period for language acquisition may have evolved as part of a larger fact of life: the increasing feebleness and vulnerability with advancing age that biologists call “senescence.”
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
Sad.
Did the old man enjoying the view?
Do you want to making love?
And quantitative research corroborates the hundreds of anecdotes. Not only are very general traits like IQ, extroversion, and neuroticism partly heritable, but so are specific ones like degree of religious feeling, vocational interests, and opinions about the death penalty, disarmament, and computer music.
A language instinct unique to modern humans poses no more of a paradox than a trunk unique to modern elephants. No contradiction, no Creator, no big bang.
We and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor, now extinct.
The biologist 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.
Lol!
So there is no contradiction in saying that every normal person can speak grammatically (in the sense of systematically) and ungrammatically (in the sense of nonprescriptively), just as there is no contradiction in saying that a taxi obeys the laws of physics but breaks the laws of Massachusetts.
I have estimated that about a fifth of all English verbs were originally nouns.
Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people recite a play and play at a recital?…How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?…
Though I am no fan of “politically correct” euphemism (in which, according to the satire, white woman should be replaced by melanin-impoverished person off gender), using terms like “bad grammar” for “nonstandard” is both insulting and scientifically inaccurate.
Whereas animals are rigidly controlled by their biology, human behavior is determined by culture, an autonomous system of symbols and values. Free from biological constraints, cultures can vary from one another arbitrarily and without limit. Human infants are born with nothing more than a few reflexes and an ability to learn. Learning is a general-purpose process, used in all domains of knowledge. Children learn their culture through indoctrination, reward and punishment, and role models.
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. [Watson, 1925]
The lessons of language have not been lost on the sciences of the rest of the mind.
With the exception of the maleness-determining gene on the Y-chromosome, every functioning gene in a man’s body is also found in a woman’s and vice versa.
Among laypeople, race is lamentably salient, but for biologists it is virtually invisible.
