The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker. 

3/5 rating. 448 pages.

Book #35 of 2020. Read June 1, 2020.

This book is a discussion of the reasons why language appears to be an instinct in much the same way that birds know how to fly or fish swim. This is part of the reason why kids are able to pick up languages so quickly, and why kids are not forced to merely learn it through rote memorization, but instead, infer rules without explicit explanation.

Steven shows that while language does have somewhat of an impact on how we think, it is much less of an effect than most people assume. He then goes into discussions of sentences, their structures, and words. All of these are looked at in order to show their complexity and the almost-certain likelihood that humans use many innate mechanisms to simplify how these are learned; as rote memorization of that much data would doubtless take decades or centuries for each child.

Steven goes on to show some of the underlying rules we use in order to form sentences, and pronounce words. This discussion does a great job of explaining why AI has such a trouble with understanding us talking.

Then, he discusses a great deal about the evolutionary portions of language: is it fully inherited, when did humans develop this ability, do apes have language?

Overall, this book was somewhat interesting, but unless you are dying to read ~450 pages on a variety of topics about language, you probably should leave this one at the store.

Quotes:

“Their skin might be different, but their shit smells bad like ours.”

“Language is the most accessible part of the mind. People want to know about language because they hope this knowledge will lead to insight about human nature.”

IG Link.