The Language Instinct

The Language Instinct argues that we are born with an innate capability to understand languages, that most of them are more similar than you might think and explains where our capability to deal with words so well comes from.

When you’re studying computer science and programming languages on a deeper level, for example in college, you’re bound to run into a guy named Noam Chomsky. He’s one of the world’s leading linguists, sometimes even called “the father of modern linguistics” and has written over 100 books, many of them about this topic.

What does a language researcher have to do with computer science? Well, if you want to understand how computers work, you have to learn how they talk – only then can you translate what you want them to do into a language they’ll understand.

I remember learning about the different types of grammars and coming up with our own in class. Chomsky is the main supporter of the idea that we are born with the skill to learn languages, and his main argument is called the poverty of the stimulus.

Here’s what it means: Since children learn languages as early as 18 months old, but can only learn from observing adults that do it the right way, they have no way of actively telling what’s right from wrong – they’re not studying languages, they just absorb them.

Yet they still apply the right rules at the right time. For example, even deaf children apply the correct grammar, just by learning sign language from their parents.

How come we can talk so effortlessly to one another? What is it about language that makes it so easy to communicate with it? According to Steven Pinker, there are two forces at play here: The arbitrariness of the sign. Our infinite use of finite media. The first principle simply means that the form words take doesn’t have a direct relation to their meaning. For example the word “cat” doesn’t sound like a cat. The sound cats make is “meow” and they’re silent when they walk, whereas “cat” is a pretty strong, snappy, short and loud word. This is a good thing, because it keeps us from trying to decipher what the word “cat” means by thinking about the way it sounds and instead lets us jump instantly to the result, because we’ve paired the word with the image through generations of rote learning instead. The second principle allows us to express anything and everything, because even though the number of words in any given language is limited, the number of combinations of words isn’t. Since we use the rules of grammar to create our own sentences, we’re not limited in how much…