The Language Instinct Quotes

“Chomsky's writings are 'classics' in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don’t they imitate their parents’ habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?),”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Chomsky is a pencil-and-paper theoretician who wouldn't know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster,”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“A woman gets into a taxi in Boston's Logan airport and asks the driver, 'Can you take me somplace where I can get scrod?' He says, 'Gee, that's the first time I've heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency"—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Syntax is complex, but the complexity is there for a reason. For our thoughts are surely even more complex, and we are limited by a mouth that can pronounce a single word at a time.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, a word boundary with no one to hear it has no sound. In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary. This becomes apparent when we listen to speech in a foreign language: it is impossible to tell where one word ends the next begins. The seamlessness of speech is also apparent in 'oro­nyms', strings of sound that can be carved into words in two different ways: The good can decay many ways / The good candy came anyways.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The word 'glamour' comes from the word 'grammar', and since the Chomskyan revolution the etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules?”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Humans are ingenious at sniffing out minor differences to figure out whom they should despise.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.)”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology—hence the ubiquitous foreign accent.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Syntax overrides carbon dioxide.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely human collective genius, as divine and endless a mystery as a living organism.” A”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“(...) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. 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.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“As educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, jocks, and valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functioning illiterates [...].
English itself will steadily decay unless we get back to basics and start to respect our language again.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Complex organs evolve by small steps for the same reason that a watchmaker does not use a sledgehammer and a surgeon does not use a meat cleaver.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“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.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“• من الممكن لوسائل الإعلام أن تكون بوتقةً للمعرفة أو تكون بالوعة تُرهات، ويتحدَّد هذا حسب هيكل حوافزها. فالحُلم الذي ظهر في فجر عصر الإنترنت بأن يؤدي إعطاء كل شخص منصة لولادة عصر تنوير جديد يبدو محرجًا اليوم وقد صرنا نعيش مع البرامج الآلية على الإنترنت والمنشورات المحرِّضة، والمشادات الكلامية، والأخبار الزائفة،”
― ستيفن بنكر, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“A reporter once sent Cary Grant the telegram, “How old Cary Grant?” He replied, “Old Cary Grant fine.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“language often allows us to express that aspect as a noun, whether or not it is a physical object. For example, when we say I have three reasons for leaving, we are counting reasons as if they were objects (though of course we do not literally think that a reason can sit on a table or be kicked across a room).”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language