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The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language QUOTES

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language QUOTES

1 " What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

2 " Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

3 " The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

4 " And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-faddle and not faddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-pong and pitter-patter rather than pong-ping and patter-pitter? Why dribs and drabs, rather than vice versa? Why can't a kitchen be span and spic? Whence riff-raff, mish-mash, flim-flam, chit-chat, tit for tat, knick-knack, zig-zag, sing-song, ding-dong, King Kong, criss-cross, shilly-shally, see-saw, hee-haw, flip-flop, hippity-hop, tick-tock, tic-tac-toe, eeny-meeny-miney-moe, bric-a-brac, clickety-clack, hickory-dickory-dock, kit and kaboodle, and bibbity-bobbity-boo? The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

5 " Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

6 " Chomsky's writings are 'classics' in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

7 " We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, a word boundary with no one to hear it has no sound. In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary. This becomes apparent when we listen to speech in a foreign language: it is impossible to tell where one word ends the next begins. The seamlessness of speech is also apparent in 'oro­nyms', strings of sound that can be carved into words in two different ways: The good can decay many ways / The good candy came anyways. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

8 " In any case, e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve, so we cannot conclude that a hominid with a restricted vowel space had little language. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

9 " Humans are ingenious at sniffing out minor differences to figure out whom they should despise. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

10 " (...) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

11 " As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

12 " İnsanlar İngilizce veya Çince ya da Apaçi dilinde düşünmez; bir düşünce dilinde düşünür. (...) Bir dili olmayanın bile zihincesi vardır, büyük ihtimalle bebeklerin ve çok sayıda hayvanın da basit dilleri vardır. Eğer bebeklerin kendi dillerinden ya da dillerine çevirecekleri bir zihinceleri olmasaydı, bir dil öğrenme gerçekleşmez hatta bir dil öğrenme bir şey ifade etmezdi. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

13 " Dış dünya âdeta el değmemiş bir orman ve az sonra neler olacağına dair başarılı öngörülerde bulunmaya tasarlanmış olan organizma, ardında aynı bu şekilde tasarlanmış daha çok bebek bırakacaktır. Mekân-zamanın nesneler ve eylemler olarak dilimlere bölünmesi, tahmin yürütmek için son derece hassas bir yöntemdir.
(...) Nesneleri sınıflar altında toplamak - yani zihincede sınıflar şeklinde etiketlemek - bir kişi bir varlık gördüğünde, kişinin doğrudan gözlemleyebileceği özelliklere kıyasla gözlemleyemeyeceği özellikler ile ilgili çıkarım yapmasına imkân sağlar. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

14 " Daha önce de belirttiğim gibi dil, insan toplulukları arasında evrenseldir ve bildiğimiz kadarıyla türümüzün tarihi boyunca var olmuştur. Diller karşılıklı anlaşılmaz da olsalar, bu yüzeysel çeşitliliğin altında yüklemleri, tümce ve sözcük yapıları, ad durumları, yardımcı yüklemleri ve daha başka ögeleriyle evrensel dilbilgisinin tek bir bilgisayımsal tasarımı yatar. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

15 " İnsanlar dil konusunda meraklı olmaktan öte tutkuludur. Sebebi belli: Dil zihnin en ulaşılabilir kısmıdır. İnsanlar dil hakkında bilgi edinmek ister çünkü bu bilginin insan doğasının iç yüzünü anlamaya yol göstereceğini bilirler. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

16 " In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

17 " A woman gets into a taxi in Boston's Logan airport and asks the driver, 'Can you take me somplace where I can get scrod?' He says, 'Gee, that's the first time I've heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

18 " Chomsky is a pencil-and-paper theoretician who wouldn't know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster, "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

19 " The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don’t they imitate their parents’ habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?), "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

20 " As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision. "

― Steven Pinker , The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language