"So the basic premise of the language instinct that such a thing could be transmitted genetically seems doubtful."in: https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-i...

Previously, I had read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought", which is also an excellent book. I enjoyed that book, so I next read this one--and I'm glad I did. "The Language Instinct" is an absolutely fascinating book! The author presents some very convincing arguments, that the acquisition of language is an instinct that has evolved over many generations, through natural selection. Steven Pinker is right on the money, when it comes to his analysis of evolution. Every chapter is compelling, and each chapter investigates language from a different perspective. In both this book, and in "The Stuff of Thought", Pinker investigates why so many seemingly irregular word usages are not irregular at all. Often we instinctively use words and phrases that seem illogical, just because "it sounds right." Pinker shows the logic underlying the usage--and each time, I just have to say, "oh-my-gosh--of course!"

This review could be long or short. I wasn't sure if I wanted to waste the time, but it's a long book and there are some seriously interesting and seriously stupid things in it. It centers on the issue of language as learned or as instinct, which can be so fine an issue that most people really wont care. For the short: it's very nice to see so much research on language presented and Pinker does a good job of explaining the often oversimplified theory that there is a genetic basis for understanding language (parts are probably split between your genetic code, but there is no one gene that controls all of it). But there is also some will-meltingly stupid material, like arguments that we can't have standards in our language because we can't judge whale songs and programming a useful speaking device wouldn't include commands like "don't split infinitives" because a screwdriver doesn't split infinitives. As he tries to illuminate how the brain creates language, the book is pretty interesting. As he tries to enforce his values, like that we shouldn't have any aesthetic consideration, he's worthless.Okay. That's the short one. Heres a longer one.Pinker's central argument does nothing for me. That argument is that we have an instinct for creating language. You can construct sentences without thinking about the structure, and even when you babble you have a sense of when to pause for verbal grammar. Think of kids picking up swearing just by hearing it they arent instructed in how to use it, but figure it out logically and intuitively. Since I already believe in this instinct and it seems pretty obvious that we do have it, an argument that it exists isn't impressive, though it was nice of him to collect so many anecdotes and studies that illustrate it to be the case. The best parts of the book are studies that show how versatile people are with language, like children picking up Pidgin or nonsense and converting them, within one generation, into grammatically sound modes of communication.The whole matter is kind of a bunk argument. Either our brains have an instinct for picking up and creating language, or we created languages that our brains are capable of picking up and using. If you think about it on those terms for so much as a minute, you'll get how silly the debate is. At best, both are partially true: we generate and imitate modes of expression that our brains can use readily. From the creation standpoint, why wouldn't we make something that's pretty close to what our brains can handle with unconscious ease? And from the instinct standpoint, why wouldn't we have instincts of some strength or other for the things that are created from inside our heads?Do we think about language or use it unconsciously? Its obvious that we do both, though we wing it more than we plot it. Its not an either/or problem, and that Pinker misses this almost entirely is sad. Parents help teach their children and foster language, from obvious examples like imparting the names for things and spelling of words, to whats been found in recent scientific studies (not in this book) examining mastery of language in children who come from households with differing amounts of speech. Every day you probably struggle for words and consciously choose what to say at least some of the time you know there is a conscious component to speech. There is unconscious and conscious education that he simply disregards because he's arguing for this instinct. Pinker choosing a side here feels like he's doing it for attention, and it's not as though this is the only time (in this book or academia in general) where it feels like his decision was unnecessary to the pursuit of truth.His side-arguments can get annoying. Sometimes he seems downright condescending on the intelligence of children and the deaf, and often he seems to skim rather than analyze evidence when it suits his arguments. For instance in the case of a Simon, a deaf boy whose deaf parents had improper signing that he did not pick up, Pinker makes serious assumptions about what he must have done with no evidence or even interviews with the boy in question to verify the conclusions. Its not even anecdotal at that point; its conjecture, which does not belong next to the real research on Simons case. Conjecture is essential in analysis, but not like this, and not in making the ironclad decisions about the way minds work as Pinker does.By far his silliest argument is in favor of descriptivism over prescriptivism. Descriptivism is the school that describes how people speak; prescriptivism deals with how people ought to. Here, like in the bunk argument over using a language consciously or unconsciously, most intelligent people understand that language functions best when we mediate between the descriptive and prescriptive influences, changing the rules to better suit some things, but sticking to them for others. Being a scientist who observes, Pinker is interested in descriptivism as it shows the most about how we are inclined to speak and act in language. But being foolishly inclined to polar positions, he argues that we ought to only follows descriptivism and does it in downright stupid ways, like saying that we don't need a speaking machine is programmed to "not split infinitives" because screwdrivers already don't split infinitives. Thats moronic and if his opposition made a similar rhetorical move he would never allow it. His conclusions are that whatever we get by the language instinct should make up all the prescriptive rules, and that whatever we dont make should constitute the rest. You know, in the way that we eat whatever tastes good, think whatever we like regardless of objective evidence and live in total anarchy without any government. Okay, those three examples are stupidity on my own part, but thats what this pure-descriptive argument deserves. It comes from his oversimplified approach to language cognition, at first pretending that people dont think or act in their education of language, and now proceeding that we shouldnt think about how were going to use it or apply intentional value. That he quotes a Shakespearian character in defense his of anti-prescriptive campaign when that author taught writing seals the deal.Now before Pinker's fans get angry over the rating alone, if you hold your mouse button over the stars you see that each correlates to a statement. One star means "I didn't like it," and for the fascinating research in the book, Pinker became too annoying and questionable at too many points for me to like his book. So it gets one star because, you see, they have prescribed meaning and are not just whatever you want them to be.

A friend, a diplomats daughter, when asked how she had managed to master Dutch when she went to a school in Suriname, shrugged.I dont know. I remember being so confused during the first day, not understanding a single word. But not so long after that, I was able to speak in Dutch. I just spoke, I dont know how.That had happened years ago, when she was still very young. We have always wondered how come children are able to learn language easily, while many, if not most adults, find the task of learning a new language bewildering, bordering with the impossible. Plus, children are not just great imitators. If they were, we would only be repeating things our parents had told us when we were small. But we dont. We dont just mimic our parents words. Something in our neural circuitry does more than just copying; it analyses grammar, it finds for pattern, it composes new combination of words... frighteningly complex processes that, so far, cannot even be matched by the most advanced of AI. C3PO is still a long way to go.The ability of learning language is one of the many subjects covered by the book The Language Instinct, written by Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist in Harvard. (No, hes not some crazy linguist who enjoys slaying people.)Language is probably the hallmark of human race. We boast our ability to communicate in words, a feature of our culture that no other living forms have. But Pinker shows us that far from being a cultural invention, language is actually an instinct. And because it is, then despite the doubts of the likes of Chomsky, it must be built gradually in the lineages one of which led to us thanks to natural selection. Aiming towards the goal of convincing us about that main point of language being an instinct, Pinker wove an abundance of evidence into this clear, mostly easy-to-swallow book. I said most, because to be frank at times I was lost among a wealth of linguistic terms that I had to crawl through, trying to just grab the general point of some parts.Nevertheless, I like Pinkers book for dissecting language thoroughly. My favourite part is of course about the language mavens people who think they have the task to safeguard the purity of language and grammar. Pinker showed us that many instances of ungrammatical words or sentences according to those mavens, are actually grammatical according to how our brain works. Very enlightening, especially for someone like me who has for quite some time lost her faith in the tyranny of KBBI and EYD of the Indonesian language. (Our own language mavens, for instance, would waste their sweat telling us that the correct spelling for lembab is lembap, though you understand that both mean the same anyway, and that you may not speak of jam delapan, but pukul delapan instead.)But hey, if this sounds like telling us to ditch our dictionaries and standard spellings and pronunciation altogether, what am I doing, writing something in what, I hope, is a neat piece of review, instead 0f sumth1n l1k3 d33s? (You might even notice that I even care to hit the spacebar twice after a period, but only once after a comma.)Well, when I talk with my sister and brother, or with my bestfriends, sometimes we use words and phrases only we understand. (I wager none of you know what an exedol is.) Sometimes we dont even have to finish our sentences. Our experience together has created specific words and phrases and shaped the language that we use when we communicate with each other. But, when I write something, keeping a general reader in mind, I must be careful to use words and phrases most, if not all, readers would understand, presenting my thought clearly, preventing misunderstanding or confusion (except if that is exactly my intention, but Joyce I am not). Hence my writing style but trust me, in verbal communication, I might sound very, very different.Language is far more interesting than filling up blanks on a question sheet with the right form of verbs, and Steven Pinker has a way of revealing to us how amazing our language and our brain are.

I have this incredible mental block about reviewing nonfiction. My formal linguistics experience is limited to exactly one History of the English Language class as a college junior (and it remains one of the most fascinating, satisfying and illuminating classroom experiences I've ever had, university-level or otherwise), which was about when I realized that the study of language was up there with the school paper and my creative-writing courses in terms of the all-over fulfillment I found in it. It helped that I had an enthusiastic professor whose wealth of knowledge and general zeal turned my disappointment in the English department's lack of additional linguistic offerings into a fervent hunt for extracurricular reading material regarding the topic, though I can't help but feel that my self-guided tour through the field isn't yielding the same benefits I'd've received from exploring the same terrain with an expert leading the way. Hence my concern that I'll sound like I'm trying to pretend that I know what I'm talking about on some deeper level when my background in the roots of language is far more recreational than academic. All's I can say for sure is that The Language Instinct was great fun, beautifully written and an absolute whirlwind of information that covers a dizzying array of unexpected but thought-provokingly relevant subjects.Oh, and that Steven Pinker has the most admirably disheveled hair since Georges Perec. Their locks are not to be trifled with, nor, clearly, are their minds. The last language-centric book I read argued in favor of a point that had been laughed into noncredibility for years thanks to the implied racism it still carried from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis days, which is that the world actually looks different based on one's view of the world based on his or her culture and language (Through the Language Glass, written by Guy Deutscher and published in 2010 -- and which I must admit to having read long enough ago that I have shamefully forgotten many of its finer details but do recall as having made a rather convincing argument, as it delved into stuff such as how a language can reflect a culture's attitude toward its women) -- an hypothesis that Pinker decried within the first 50 pages of this 1994 bestseller as "wrong, all wrong," as it is his view that "discussions that assume that language determines thought carry on only by a collective suspension of disbelief." My copy of The Language Instinct includes Pinker's chapter-by-chapter asides about updates in the many areas he explored in a book he published more than two decades ago, including the neo-Whorfism that has sprung up in recent years, a revival that allowed works such as Through the Language Glass to be taken more seriously because the misguided blinders and red herrings of the linguistic avenue of contemplation have finally fallen away and its points can be made in such a way to sidestep the unfortunate pitfalls of the past.Seeing the inverse of an argument made just as successfully as my initial exposure to it was what sucked me in for good with this book. The overlapping of an argument's two sides and seeing familiar names, familiar backgrounds, familiar failings and completely different conclusions were all strangely rewarding payoffs for my own curious, solitary explorations. And that spark of recognition just kept cropping up in myriad forms as I read on and on (and on and on, as it took me, like, two months to finish this -- absolutely no fault of Pinker's, but rather that of my compulsion to juggle two and three books at once and work's nasty habit of reducing my reading time in two-week cycles). While the biology and neurobiology and child development and abnormal psych were all a bit of alien territory for me, Pinker presented them all in such accessible ways that my tactile-learner self was picking up everything he was putting down. Which made the friendlier faces I'd seen before all the more inviting: The progression of Old English to Middle English to Modern English was like having tea (or mead) with an old friend, reading about the Great Vowel Shift was like reminiscing with an old lover and wondering if maybe the stars are finally aligned in our favor, the uncanny commonalities between seemingly unrelated tongues was a kiddie ball pit wrapped in a trampoline for my brain, and the pages and chapters of grammatical theory? Be still, my pedantic heart! I didn't even mind, as a happily neurotic proofreader, when Pinker started asserting that maybe the Grammar Mavens have their priorities all wrong, that even nontraditional dialects have their merits, that "whom" ought to go the way of "ye" and its other equally antiquated brethren, that it's okay to hang on to the rules of usage for clarity's sake rather than browbeating those poor folks who don't work themselves into paroxysms of glee at the very notion of sentence diagrams over their truly nitpicky transgressions. I had no idea the lengths and detail necessary in asserting that something so mind-bogglingly complex but is so universally taken for granted -- that is, human speech -- is a deep-seated biological impulse, hard-wired into our brains to the point that we are all, in fact, baby geniuses when it comes to sussing out most of the nuances of our diabolically tricky native languages by the age of three. I had no well-formed opinion on the matter of language as a learned habit versus a communicative imperative instilled in us via evolution before coming into this but did Pinker ever reel me in, hold my attention and make me want to delve deeper into his research, theories and positions regarding the language instinct. Bearing witness to the impressive lengths he goes to to cover all his ground from every angle is reward enough for hearing him out for nearly 500 pages, because Pinker's dedication to the language instinct is evident enough in the miles of homework he did to make his point with armfuls of wide-ranging detail and chapter upon chapter of some truly compelling writing.