October 4
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker (1994)

This is one of the three books I picked up after Darcy's recommendation in the exchange about evolution (um, the part that I haven't published yet...) and the only one I finished. It's entertaining, in a meandering sort of way. It starts with a sprawling discussion of how language works, including a thorough discussion of English grammar as it really is -- which is rather different from the fussy prescriptive grammar that we learn in school. This blends in with a discussion of how the brain processes language, which in turn entails a lot of detailed observations about how toddlers learn language as well as evidence from various special situations such as deaf children, children raised in deprived isolation, adults with brain tumors causing selective aphasia, and so forth.

Gradually all of this discussion coalesces around the standard cognitive science theory that brains are genetically programmed to learn language. They are not programmed to learn any particular language, but they do have a built-in procedure whereby the child makes sense out of the sounds he or she hears and deduces a language out of them. This is not "learning" in the sense of acquiring knowledge, it is a scheduled process of human growth, sort of like growing teeth. (Learning a second language as an adult is learning in that sense, which is why it's so much harder.) Thus, Pinker concludes, language is an instinct. Hence the title.

Well into the second half of the book, there is some discussion of how the human species might have evolved this instinct. That in turn leads to a digression about evolutionary theory, which I think is what prompted Darcy to mention it along with Dawkins' Selfish Gene. There are many digressions in the book. Like me, Pinker is an unfocused writer with a tendency to wander off into neighboring topics which interest him.

The penultimate chapter -- the final one is a sort of summing-up plus some theorizing and speculations for a future book -- is a well-contained digression, only barely connected to the rest of the book. Here Pinker critiques the various types of "language mavens", which is the name he gives to those grammarians, journalists and other stylemongers who are always writing about writing. Pinker classifies them into four categories: the wordwatcher, the jeremiah, the entertainer, and the sage.

He is particularly harsh on the first two. The wordwatcher is the writer who peddles entertaining etymologies. Pinker lambastes them for all the phony urban myths they propagate. There's something to that, but not all wordwatchers are inaccurate. For the rest, Pinker says he just isn't interested in etymology, which is his preference but not mine. The jeremiah is the writer who proclaims that civilization is going straight to hell because of this or that neologism. The entertainer is the language maven "who shows off his collection of palindromes, puns, anagrams," etc.

Of these entertainers, Pinker says,

He makes a good point. The more natural talents of words really are fascinating, as The Language Instinct itself demonstrates well. It's also true that some of the entertainer's tricks are dopey and boring, but I still love some of the others -- especially W.R. Espy, one of the names he cites.

The sage is the thoughtful and measured advisor on style. Pinker names William Safire and Theodore Bernstein as examples, and I would guess that Henry Fowler must qualify as a sage as well, if perhaps a curmudgeonly one. Unlike the jeremiah, the sage doesn't draw ridiculous conclusions about civilization, and unlike the wordwatcher he isn't just making up bullshit. Pinker expresses some respect for the sages, but even so he proceeds to point up some specific examples where they've got it all wrong.

Pinker's anti-mavenry is more than just the usual argument that language is always evolving and the prescriptivists are a bunch of elitist poops. It's even more than offering choice illustrations of how what the maven complains about today (eg, using "impact" as a verb) is a simple repetition of an earlier process that the maven accepts without question (eg, using "contact" as a verb). Because of his background and knowledge as a cognitive scientist, Pinker is able to explain things which the purely literary Safire and Bernstein simply don't understand -- such as why certain compounds take an irregular plural and others don't, or why the baseball player who hit a fly ball "flied out" rather than "flew out". These things aren't just arbitrary. They have to do with how the human brain processes language and applies true grammatical rules. Pinker is able to explain these, in the way that a language maven should.

I took some intermittent notes this time, but with no real order to them. This first one is just a quote that I like:

My vocabulary list has just one word, exigencies, and I neglected to make a note of the page. This is one of those words I've seen a lot but never quite bothered to really learn. Looking it up now, I see that exigencies are those things which are required in a particular situation.

Another note registers my pleasure that "Alz-heimer's" was correctly hyphenated across a line break. Sometimes I see this done as "Al-zheimer's". I think my note is telling me also that other words were hyphenated wrong, but the note isn't really clear.

Commenting on the largeness of the English language's vocabulary, Pinker writes:

What amazes me about this is that the AP managed to go for ten months without anyone using fuzzier or groveled.

Although it's not entirely clear, I assume that the December mentioned there is still in 1988. One gets the impression that the author thinks of cataloguing all those millions of words as a major technological feat. The book was written in 1994, and it is an ongoing minor embarrassment that it includes so many analogies to the computer technology of the time. I remember well floppy disks and writing home-made programs in BASIC, but when I read about them in the book it's sort of like looking at pictures of the dorky clothes and hairstyles we wore in high school. At one point Pinker is discussing a bit of genetic material and notes that the one small piece contains 10 megabytes of information, and he seems in awe of that. On the computer I had in the early 1990s, 10 MB probably would have filled up my entire hard drive. Today it's nothing. Today, 10 MB is a short video clip that takes a few minutes to download.

In presenting the language instinct as an extremely complicated and functional system which evolved uniquely for a single species, he cites an elephant's trunk as another example of the same thing. Maybe I just haven't read much about elephants, but the list of things an elephant can do with the trunk amazed me.

OK, so maybe it's not that fascinating, but it still impressed me more than the loudly trumpeted list of cultural traits common to every known human culture, which Pinker himself found so fascinating. I think it was the dime and the pin that really got me. (And by the way, does an elephant really have knees on its front legs? Wouldn't those be elbows?)

There were quite a few typographic/spelling errors in this book, including "phython" near the end of the elephant paragraph just quoted. I fixed that here. I didn't fix "draw character" earlier in the paragraph, which may or may not be a typo; I think it makes more sense as "draw characters" or "draw a character". I'd guess there are about 30 or 40 typos in the whole book, which is rather high. In general, I tend to think of a few typos as standard for a book these days, but I think the last few I read were free of them. Maybe that's another Penguin thing. If I would read just one book at a time, I could probably have a better sense of this.

About half the typos were in quoted passages, which makes me think the author was cutting and pasting from sloppy sources which he didn't bother to proofread. One of these was "speces", which was particularly amusing since earlier in the book (several days earlier, as I read it), he made a point about phonetics by citing some comedian who had a bit about "endangered feces".

Elsewhere, a series of examples of particularly beautiful language included the first lines of Lolita, attributed to "Valdimir Nabokov". Oddly enough, we are living in a time when two different men named Vladimir have a place in the American public's awareness. One is the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, whose first name Bush pronounced as "Vlad-i-murr" in the recent debate. In the comments at the blog formerly known as CalPundit I noticed that several thought this was sufficient reason to make fun of Bush, along with his alleged mispronunciation of mullah. (I guess they've finally dropped the complaint about "nucular".)

An interesting observation Pinker makes earlier in the book is that any language is going to evolve phonetically, and that evolution follows certain general patterns of phonetic simplification. If groups of speakers are sufficiently separate, their pronunciations will evolve in different direction, leading to regional accents, which in turn might eventually contribute to dialectical differences. When groups with different regional accents hear one another, each accuses the other of being sloppy and lazy, recognizing the unfamiliar phonetic simplification in the foreign accent while remaining oblivious to the familiar phonetic simplification in one's own. In our society, it seems like it's always the Southern accent, and especially its African American variant, that gets ridiculed -- or at least that's how it is among my peers. Maybe in the South they make fun of lazy and sloppy pronunciation by Yankees, like our tendency to reduce unstressed syllables and neutralize their vowels.

The other well-known Vladimir is Anaheim Angels clean-up hitter Vladimir Guerrero, who in Monday night's game flied out in each of his first two at-bats, and then after Tuesday night's game flew out to Boston with the rest of the team. (The Angels are trailing 0-2 in a five-game series in the first round of the playoffs. If their opponent were the Oakland A's, they'd be in great shape....)

This Vladimir has a curiously oxymoronic name, in that in Spanish a guerrero is a warrior while in Russian Vladimir is the Lord of Peace. The peace part is "-mir" -- no doubt someone will find it significant that it's the syllable President Bush mispronounced -- which was also the name of a Soviet space station. An earlier Soviet space station was Soyuz, which means union. Soyuz was the first word in the Russian rendering of "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and the only word in that name which isn't cognate with its English equivalent. That's why they called themselves "SSSR" instead of "USSR" -- except that in Cyrillic it looked like "CCCP", since the Cyrillic C corresponds to the Latin S, and the Cyrillic P corresponds to the Latin R.

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