The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a 'featherless biped' and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken.” Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. 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. 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. 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.

That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. I also hope to answer many natural questions about languages, like why there are so many of them, why they are so hard for adults to learn, and why no one seems to know the plural of Walkman.“The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science, but the news has been kept a secret.įor the language lover, I hope to show that there is a world of elegance and richness in quotidian speech that far outshines the local curiosities of etymologies, unusual words, and fine points of usage.įor 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, artifically intelligent computers, neural networks, signing chimps, talking Neanderthals, idiot savants, feral children, paradoxical brain damage, identical twins separated at birth, color pictures of the thinking brain, and the search for the mother of all languages. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. I have never met a person who is not interested in language.

Pinker the language instinct