The Language Instinct Quotes

“In any case, e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve, so we cannot conclude that a hominid with a restricted vowel space had little language.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“never met a person who is not interested in language. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science,”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

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

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

“of usage. For the reader of popular science, I hope to explain what is behind the recent discoveries (or, in many cases, nondiscoveries) reported in the press: universal deep structures, brainy babies, grammar genes, artificially intelligent computers, neural networks, signing chimps, talking Neanderthals, idiot savants, feral”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“marketroid n. Member of a company’s marketing department.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“an exception: in the sentence I asked him what he thought of my review in his book, and his response was unprintable, the word unprintable means something much more specific than “incapable of being printed.”) The”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The English language is a rich verbal tapestry woven together from the tongues of the Greeks, the Latins, the Angles, the Klaxtons, the Celtics, and many more other ancient peoples, all of whom had severe drinking problems.” Let”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-faddle and not faddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-pong and pitter-patter rather than pong-ping and patter-pitter? Why dribs and drabs, rather than vice versa? Why can't a kitchen be span and spic? Whence riff-raff, mish-mash, flim-flam, chit-chat, tit for tat, knick-knack, zig-zag, sing-song, ding-dong, King Kong, criss-cross, shilly-shally, see-saw, hee-haw, flip-flop, hippity-hop, tick-tock, tic-tac-toe, eeny-meeny-miney-moe, bric-a-brac, clickety-clack, hickory-dickory-dock, kit and kaboodle, and bibbity-bobbity-boo? The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“For example, there is an old grammarian’s saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior’s bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, “Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Darwin concluded that language ability is “an instinctive tendency to acquire an art,” a design that is not peculiar to humans but seen in other species such as song-learning birds. A language instinct may seem jarring to those who think of language as the zenith of the human intellect and who think of instincts as brute impulses that compel furry or feathered zombies to build a dam or up and fly south. But one of Darwin’s followers, William James, noted that an instinct possessor need not act as a “fatal automaton.” He argued that we have all the instincts that animals do, and many more besides; our flexible intelligence comes from the interplay of many instincts competing. Indeed, the instinctive nature of human thought is just what makes it so hard for us to see that it is an instinct: It takes…a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, “Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made for all eternity to be loved!” And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in presence of particular objects…. To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be loved; to the bear, the she-bear. To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“(The “fact” that we use only five percent of our brains, that lemmings commit mass suicide, that the Boy Scout Manual annually outsells all other books, and that we can be coerced into buying by subliminal messages are other examples.)”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The highest percentage of ungrammatical sentences was found in the proceedings of learned academic conferences.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language