I don't know if I would've enjoyed this book half as much had I not listened to the audiobook, but it was a pleasant commute read.

Yes, this book has grammar trees breaking sentences down like you did in school. No, it doesn't hurt that much.

Pinker shattered for me the conventional wisdom (for which he partially blames the Newspeak essay at the end of 1984) that language determines thought—"Mentalese" is real. His tour of Chomsky's universal grammar and how the world's languages all share a similar underlying structure kept me rapt with the particular deconstructionist fever I sometimes get when programming. My assumptions about how much languages around the world differ also got exploded.

The last third drags a bit when we go on a tour through both English's aphoneticism(?) and it's all its local dialects' various disregard for "the rules," all to prove a point he hammers home over and over—that people use grammar with a higher degree of precision than most people give them credit for. He also leans a bit on the fact that engineers hadn't even imagined how computers might succeed in a real way at things like image recognition and generalized problem solving as evidence that the brain must have some very specific machinery to do so—a more difficult link to accept in the age of Google's burgeoning omniscience.

There's also a clear lack of biological evidence for the kinds of structures we inherit genetically that he's positing play specific roles in parsing and constructing grammatical sentences, but that's not the fault of the science author talking about the bleeding edge of research—now I'm curious what more we've learned in the 20 years since!

That surely took its time!

The reason behind that, despite the apparent excess of time, is that it's not an easy read. The flow of ideas is smooth, sure, but you need them laid out to you. I needed the audiobook. And while i don't recommend it for a bedtime read, listen to it while doing chores that don't require your full attention.

The book itself is a dive into the specific aspects of Language, and different languages especially English, and the idea of a mental language, a universal one that holds the ground for a role of genetics -beside upbringing- in the development of language-speaking homo sapiens.

The later parts discuss hypotheses and educated guesses on the route through which language emerged, evolutionarily speaking, and evidence supporting or refuting different points of view.

Cuando una persona tiene que leer un libro obligatoriamente para una asignatura de su carrera y, varios años más tarde, vuelve a releer el mismo libro por placer, es que de verdad merece la pena. Este es mi caso con Pinker y su Instinto del lenguaje. Gracias, Christoph Ehlers, por un magnífico programa de Introducción a la Lingüística.