A friend, a diplomat’s daughter, when asked how she had managed to master Dutch when she went to a school in Suriname, shrugged.
“I don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t. We don’t 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, he’s 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 Pinker’s 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 don’t 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.

This book was absolutely insufferable but before I get into it let me first be up front that I only read closely chapters 1-6, read quite quickly chapters 7-8, and then skimmed through chapters 9-13. After you read this review, you'll understand why I had no choice but to skim through the second half.

As a language lover, a teacher of English and Chinese, and a speaker of English, Chinese, and German, it's been on my reading list for a long time. I finally got around to reading it and after reading just a few chapters I was astounded that this is a best seller. Pinker continually makes enormous claims that aren't adequately backed up. Continually, he bounces around from one assertion to the next without any coherency. His overall writing style comes off as pseudo-academic, to be frank.

Pinker constantly mentions Chomsky in virtually every single chapter. Ironically, Chomsky doesn't think much of Pinker. If you listen to his interviews on Youtube, Chomsky has some somewhat strongly worded things to say. He describes him as "intelligent," "a friend," "who has done serious work in psycholinguistics and cognitive science," but beyond that, Chomsky just contrasts what can be made of the gobbledygook Pinker produces with others who have done "serious work." That's a real damning review from Chomsky.

However, the main reason I couldn't seriously closely read the second half of the book was because of inaccuracies; I feared I would be learning incorrect information. He mentions the Chinese language several times in the first half dozen chapters, and a majority of the time is just flat out wrong. He writes, "English speakers correctly guess that in Chinese ch'ing means light and ch'ung means heavy." Not using pinyin aside, that's just flat out not true. Depending on not only the tone but also the character, the meaning of the utterance can change completely. It gets worse. A couple chapters later, he writes, "In some ways, a morphemic writing system has served the Chinese well, despite the inherent disadvantage that readers are at a loss when they face a new or rare word." Readers are hardly "at a loss" because characters are made up of different radicals that can tip one off to the meaning. But Pinker doesn't know that because he hasn't actually learned any Chinese. (In fact, he hasn't learned any foreign languages.) He goes on, "and many documents that are thousands of years old are readable by modern speakers." This is absolutely shocking because it is in no way true. Texts from thousands of years ago are nothing like modern Chinese. Classical Chinese is not understandable to modern speakers of Chinese. They have to learn it just like how native speakers of English would have to learn Old English if they wanted to understand it. It is for all intents and purposes a completely different language even if there are a few remnants of Classic Chinese in modern Chinese. It is amazing to have such an enormous oversight in a best seller and from someone so famous. This is the main reason I had to stop reading the book closely and just skim the rest. I can't really take seriously anything else he says in the book given these massive oversights about Chinese. Naturally, my fear is if he's so flat our wrong about almost everything he says about Chinese, how am I to believe other claims he's making about things I'm not educated about?

To return to what I was saying about style, I should mention there's also no important context to the mentions of Chinese in those chapters. He bounces around randomly writing about different examples and never ties in the important pieces to really say anything interesting. I keep asking myself "But why should I care about this?" Sometimes chapters would end and it just seemed like he got bored and stopped writing there randomly. I assure you this is not because of my own lack of intelligence, although I am sure Pinker fans would be quick to make that claim. Rather I think it's because Pinker is a stylist. He's a master at seeming brilliant, when in reality, it's mostly hogwash presented as valuable insight.

I will admit that there is a possibility that I am also simply not interested in the math and science of language. I am much more interested in how it is acquired, how we can learn it better and more quickly as adults, problems in the FL classroom, TPRS and Krashen's comprehensible input theory, and other topics. Musings about random linguistic related topics that really just make your eyes roll isn't something I'm interested in reading. So I do take responsibility for what I like and the style of writing and presentation I personally care for. That is indeed subjective. I could see how this style of writing would appeal to others. That said, the inaccuracies are too numerous and so you can't really recommend this book to anyone.

I have to warn people considering reading this book. It is essentially pop science littered with false information. But don't take my word for it. Just trust Chomsky. He did, after all, imply that Pinker's books are not "serious work."

Me faltarían un par de capítulos, pero hoy acabo la asignatura así que no pienso leer una palabra más.

En realidad ha sido más interesante de lo que pensaba al principio y algunos temas incluso me han interesado, pero le sobran páginas por un tubo. Podría decir exactamente lo mismo con 15-20 páginas menos por capítulo y la argumentación es bastante caótica (desde luego, Pinker suspendió Herramientas). De su "sentido del humor" (?) mejor no comento nada, porque 316 páginas después todavía no lo he entendido; pero he sobrevivido y eso es lo importante

Very interesting, as with previous Steven Pinker books I have enjoyed, the author displays his admirable ability to gather together a lot of research/information in a wide range of areas into a coherent explanation - here supporting an innate human instinct to acquire and use language. Full of illustrative examples, apparently fair and balanced, well-constructed arguments here provide a convincing case without feeling biased or unjustly critical of counter arguments.

My only criticism would be that I would have been convinced by a book half the length of this. It wasn’t necessarily over-long or difficult to get through, it just felt in places that certain aspects (the algebra and logic of linguistics especially) were examined in more depth than was necessary. Perhaps I needed less explanation and fewer examples than some readers, perhaps the author just wanted to speak at length about aspects he found particularly interesting, it detracted slightly from my enjoyment. Nevertheless I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to anyone interested in the field.

It took me a long time to finish this book.
I didn't understand parts of it: as Pinker was going on about linguistics, it was a little hard to follow, but I guess it shows how extremely knowledgeable he is.
Overall, I recommend this book to anyone that is really interested in linguistics, I was a bit disappointed as I was expecting a little more biology and neuroscience.

In this very entertaining book, Steven Pinker has given a kind of overview and popularization of contemporary linguistics, as developed by Noam Chomsky. He argues that there is a language instinct, developed through evolution, which shapes how any human being acquires language. This is in opposition to the idea that we are blank slates, perhaps very intelligent blank slates, who learn everything from our environment and our culture. The Chomskyan idea is that all human languages have certain basic structures, such as noun phases and verb phrases, which small children seem to understand even as they acquire their native language. These structures are innate, according to Chomsky and Pinker, and are part of an instinct or natural capability for language which results from evolution.

Pinker engages in a wide-ranging discussion of language which covers everything from phonetics, the inventory of raw sounds that are available to the human larynx, to language mavens, the self-described experts on language who want to be the arbiters of good grammar. I found the whole discussion fascinating, and I am trying to internalize the basics of Chomsky’s approach, so that I can go on to read some more technical linguistics.

A couple of issues engaged me. One was the debate between a prescriptive approach to language and a descriptive approach, between those who argue that there is a grammatically correct way to speak (the way we ought to speak), and those who say that linguistics only describes how people actually use language. Pinker inveighs against the prescriptivists, saying that even small children have an instinct to use appropriate grammatical structures. He makes fun of the shibboleths of grammarians, such as not splitting infinitives, offering in each case an argument as to why the supposedly ungrammatical phrase exhibits an inherent grammatical sense.

I’m not sure the boundary between prescriptive and descriptive approaches is so clear. If I am learning Spanish, say, then I want to know the rules for when to use the subjunctive. Those rules are normative, prescriptive, for me, even if there is some logic to whatever mistakes I make. Pinker could say that the rules are normative only in a hypothetical sense, that they are contingent on my wanting to speak like a native. But of course I do want to speak any acquired language, or my own language, as well and as effectively as possible. So, for practical purposes, grammar can be prescriptive as well as descriptive.

Another bone of contention actually occurs between Pinker and Chomsky. Pinker argues that our language instinct is based on evolution. Chomsky has said that scientific factors other than evolution may have determined how we acquire language. To explain Chomsky, Pinker offers the example of a fish jumping out of the water and diving back in. Evolution may have developed the capacity to jump out of the water, but gravity determines that the fish will return to water. A linguistic example might be that acoustics, more than evolution, may have determined the inventory of sounds available to use in language. Pinker seems puzzled by Chomsky’s point, and specifically disagrees with it.

My take is that there may be logical constraints on how language is acquired. Logic is a kind of science, like mathematics, but different from the empirical sciences. The grammatical structure of languages may have something in common with the logical structure of arguments. Perhaps there is no logical alternative to sentences containing a noun phrase and a verb phrase. If that is the case, then to that extent the constraint on language is logical and not evolutionary, although of course the two work hand in hand. I will have to read more to discover if my interpretation of Chomsky is plausible.

Steven Pinker has made a strong impression on me with his clear writing so I have been making a point of reading all I can of his work. This is one of his earlier books and concerns linguistics. I will acknowledge that I do not understand the formal structure of even my own language, and was often befuddled by terms which I feel I should know such as ‘transitive verb’, but when explained I intuitive understand what makes sense and what does not make sense.

I accept Pinker’s thesis that we are hard wired to language in a way chimpanzees and bonobos are not. The instinct is somewhere in our code. He writes well and I accept that I should pay attention to why the rules of grammar and not just rely on instinct and intuition. (I Wikipediaed transitive verb and I am still clueless).

Pinker is as much of a twit as his hair suggests: The Language Instinct is a miserable pile of unsupported and unsupportable conclusions, straw man attacks, hypocrisy leap-frogging into doublethink, shoddy reasoning, knee-jerk contrarianism, indeliberate obtusity, and gut-feeling argumentation. Pinker tries to synthesize the ideas of people smarter than he is (Chomsky, mostly), and many of these are perfectly fine the way they were originally formulated; they no longer are after Pinker is through defending them, because he understands neither the ideas nor any arguments in their favour.
As an example, do you remember the argument Dawkins once made, possibly in The Blind Watchmaker, about how very small changes can accumulate and turn into very significant results in a relatively small amount of time? He used a hypothetical population of mice that grew in average size by one percent every generation, and showed that within a few thousand generations — a mere couple of millennia! — those mice would be the size of elephants. Pinker tries to use this same story to show that small *selection pressures* can have significant results quickly:

> ``Imagine a mouse that was subject to a miniscule selection pressure for increased size—say, one percent reproductive advantage for offspring that were one percent bigger. Some arithmetic shows that the mouse's descendants would evolve to the size of an elephant in a few thousand generations, an evolutionary eyeblink.''

Which is obviously fractally incoherent, as he would have realised if he'd understood Dawkins's argument instead of just trying to repeat it to try to get a good review by him for the back cover (which he got), or even just tried to do said arithmetic. The sad part is that what he set out to argue is actually true; his bungled argument just undermined it.
This is par for the course (there are more egregious examples, but this one stuck because it's Dawkins), and Pinker repeatedly fucks over his main thesis — that language is instinctive, which was as uncontroversial in 1994, when the book was written, as it is now — in the same way. Worse than that, though, he then tries to pretend that arguments in favour of this thesis mean that language is *nothing but* instinctive and, incidentally, uniquely human, and that ``therefore'' everything from linguistic prescriptivism to animal language to Sapir-Whorf to being interested in etymology is completely and utterly wrong-headed and obviously moronic, which he tries to back up by attacking caricatures of these things or, not infrequently, the character of the people involved.

Anyway, other people have apparently done thorough jobs of taking apart The Language Instict, so I won't waste any more time on it. Not everything he says is wrong (stopped clocks and all that), and it's a lot like Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind in that some of the digressions are interesting enough, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so pathetically low that the book as a whole isn't worth your time. Read Chomsky instead; Pinker would claim he's saying the same things he is anyway, which demonstrates just how confused he is.
Maybe it's just because TLI is his first book. Elsewhere in my to-read stack is his most recent one, The Stuff of Thought; we'll see how it compares. I'm not holding my breath. Ultimately, the problem isn't that he was new to writing, because he wasn't; it's that he's a psychologist, and not a real scientist.

Steven Pinker lets you dive into the 'Science of Language'. The science of how languages created and learned by humans; more from a psycholinguistics perspective. Do we learn it while starting from a 'blank slate'? or is there something (some instinct) that got evolved over time that endowns us with the ability to learn langugaes early one?

It is a dense book, but will let you see 'languages' in a different way. Languagues as a whole, not individual languages in particular. The entire concept of language(s).

I just picked this up from the library today, so I'm not far into it, but it's hard to put down. What strikes me as interesting so far is that this would be a really great book for someone who's just getting into linguistics, and yet it's also great if you're already familiar with all its principles. An added bonus is that I'm starting to suspect a lot of the material for the linguistics course I'm taking this semester seems to have been lifted directly from this book...It's a fun read. Steven Pinker kind of seems like the Willy Wonka of linguistics. They should put that on his next book cover.

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.” The experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker, took this quote as the inspiration for his book on – what he considers – the idea that there exists an innate language instinct to be found across all cultures. Elaborating on the canonical linguistic ideas of Noam Chomsky, particularly in regard to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, Pinker presents the lay reader with numerous examples of how language acquisition, grammatical comprehension, and the tendency to speak, are all aspects of an innate linguistic tendency that human beings share, regardless of cultural background or specific language.

Though Pinker generally agrees with Chomsky’s work on Universal Grammar, The Language Instinct focuses primarily on the idea that thoughts create language, a mental process that Pinker refers to as “mentalese”. This theoretical linguistic perspective is diametric to that of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which suggests that language determines thought, and that the particular culture one belongs to is unique, in turn greatly affecting the way that a person communicates, utilizes language, and ultimately, perceives the world around them.
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In Chapter one, entitled “An Instinct to Acquire an Art”, Pinker covers the two opposing linguistic schools, and talks about Chomsky and his research on Universal grammar. Pinker begins his polemic on Whorfian claims about language coloring in human perspective by discussing Chomsky’s skepticism, concerning not merely the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, but the “Standard Social Science Model” (SSCM) in general. Pinker, siding with Chomsky, feels that, not only is the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis wrong, but the basic intellectual stance that “the human psyche is molded by the surrounding culture”, is a dramatic misconception inspired by the SSCM. However, as we see later in the book, Pinker will part ways with Chomsky, ideologically. Though they both feel that grammar is a discrete combinatorial system; and is also a soundly structured tool with words and rules that human beings have an innate tendency to acquire, Chomsky is apprehensive about whether or not this language instinct, or gene, is part of the process of evolutionary adaptation. Pinker feels that the language instinct is similar to the human eye in that it has the appearance of design. In other words, the eye, for human beings, is a tool engineered with a very specific purpose. It has the appearance of design, and elements of an engineered tool, just like a camera, or an engine. The significant point that Pinker does take from Chomsky’s work is his claim that “the same symbol-manipulating machinery, without exception, underlies the world’s languages.”
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A chapter by chapter synopsis of a book of such layered complexity would become tedious after chapter 5. Everything from Broca’s Aphasia (which can cause language impairment), to x-bar theory (a theoretical version of phrase structure proposed by Chomsky that compares common grammatical rules and structures across different languages), artificial intelligence, prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, and language organs and grammar genes, is covered in this erudite defense of Universal Grammar. These examples are useful to Pinker because they assist him in elucidating his rational stance on a language of thought. Logic-heavy gems such as, “And if there can be two thoughts corresponding to one word, thoughts can’t be words”, are peppered throughout the book. When he talks about x-bar theory, he explains how, “A part of speech, then, is not a kind of meaning: it is a kind of token that obeys certain formal rules, like a chess piece or a poker chip.” Pinker’s strongest arguments for a Universal Grammar or a language of thought, primarily concern phrase structure within sentences.

Chomsky laid much of the ground on syntactic structures in his linguistic work in the 1960’s. But Pinker sees grammar as a technical aspect of language that “offers a clear refutation of the empiricist doctrine that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.” So, again, the book is covering a lot of linguistic ground concerning academic debates about what language essentially is, but for Pinker, an unabashed devotee of Darwin, The Language Instinct is also about how language is an innate tendency that undergoes evolutionary adaptive processes. He disagrees with the Whorfians and cultural relativists in the sense that he sees grammatical comprehension and language acquisition as innate tendencies. It’s not that he disagrees with the claim that culture can occasionally influence how people speak, or the way a language sounds. Pinker simply believes that there is a common capacity for speech and language utilization across all cultures, and it’s not that different. Again, he refers to the apparent design of language toward the end of chapter 10, entitled “Language Organs and Grammar Genes”, when he reflects, “I would expect the basic design of language, from x-bar syntax to phonological rules and vocabulary structure to be uniform across the species; how else could children learn to talk and adults understand one another.”
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In the academic arena of linguistics, this debate between people arguing that language is an innate instinct and those that feel that language influences thought is slightly less prominent than it was in the past. In example, one of the strongest claims supporting the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis is that the speakers of the Piraha tribe of South America were incapable of using recursion (inserting embedded clauses within sentences ad infinitum) in their language. In 2004, Peter Gordon conducted an experiment consisting of various counting exercises in order to determine whether or not the Piraha were capable of counting exact cardinalities. He concluded that the Piraha had numbers for one, few, and many, but were incapable of remembering large exact numbers. Gordon’s experimental design was relatively crude, and he merely concluded that the Piraha couldn’t count that well under the conditions of the experiment. Since then, the linguist Andrew Nevins, along with his colleagues concluded that Piraha does allow for some recursive embedding using verb suffixes and conversions of nouns to verbs. It is also possible to conjoin propositions within a sentence, such as “We ate a lot of the fish, but there was some fish that we did not eat." The debunking of linguistic myths such as the apparent absence of recursion in the Piraha language, are concrete proof that Pinker is on to something profound when he suggests an underlying linguistic design in human nature.
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One might argue that, throughout The Language Instinct, Pinker attempts to insert too many anecdotes from technical linguistics as well as from popular culture. The Language Instinct was one of Pinker’s first popular science books. This onslaught of information is understandable as he is a trained experimental psychologist trying to make technical linguistic explanations understandable to a lay audience. He does so with flying colors. There is also his Darwinist bent, along with the genetic approach to language research, which many traditional linguists (especially academic Whorfians, clearly) might find a little too reductionist. What stands out in this wonderfully informative book is Pinker’s basic, non-threatening theoretical stance that language is part of an adaptive process in nature. There may be notable superficial distinctions across different languages, but the basic structure of language and its apparent design is something that is utilized across all cultures, regardless of location, history, or linguistic origin. For Pinker, culture is not to be devalued or overlooked, but when lost in the cacophonous babel of world languages he opines, “I imagine seeing through the rhythms to the structures underneath, and sense that we all have the same minds.”

Its a fun argument, though lacks sufficient evidence to be fit for a book, more suited towards a 30 min youtube video.