The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

syntax and sense can be independent of each other,

No system today can duplicate a person’s ability to recognize both many words and many speakers. Perhaps the state of the art is a system called DragonDictate, which runs on a personal computer and can recognize 30,000 words.

How fast it become the old, now we have Siri and Ok, Google :)

Speech recognition may be so hard that there are only a few ways it could be solved in principle. If so, the way the brain does it may offer hints as to the best way to build a machine to do it, and how a successful machine does it may suggest hypotheses about how the brain does it.

George Bernard Shaw led a vigorous campaign to reform the English alphabet, a system so illogical, he said, that it could spell fish as “ghoti”—gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation. (“Mnomnoupte” for minute and “mnopspteiche” for mistake are other examples.)

a visiting Martian scientist would surely conclude that aside from their mutually unintelligible vocabularies, Earthlings speak a single language.

Thus most languages have SVO or SOV order; fewer have VSO; VOS and OVS are rare (less than 1%); and OSV may be nonexistent (there are a few candidates, but not all linguists agree that they are OSV).

OLD ENGLISH (c. 1000): Faeder ure thu the eart on heofonum, si thin nama gehalgod. Tobecume thin rice. Gewurthe in willa on eorthan swa swa on heofonum.

It's impossible to read ever, than understand! %)

Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology—hence the ubiquitous foreign accent.

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.

That's the best explanation why not!