Krishna
We have reviewed quite a few books by this author. For two examples, see The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now!
Steven argues that language is not a learned thing but is an instinct. He is not referring to any specific language, of course. He simply mentions that the art of talking and language is inbuilt in men, as exemplified by a baby’s babble and the ease with which children learn languages and intuit their grammar as well.
He says how, when people explored the world and met other cultures, nobody met a culture without its own language.
He also explains how dialects and slang, which are looked down upon by advocates of ‘proper’ English are also equally rich in sentence formation and sometimes more precise than even Standard English.
He then continues to discuss language and thought and how, contrary to popular belief, the former does not influence the latter and moreover, thought seems to be universal.
Many great scientists have come to their conclusions visually (the most famous being Watson’s dreaming of the double helix for the DNA) and then validated it though rigorous equations and analysis.
He then goes into great (and, frankly, a little boring) analysis of how words are interpreted in context and by mental pictures.
Then he goes into sentence structure that is a lot more boring for a layman like me. And this is the thing about Steven Pinker. He takes amazing subjects and argues his case like no other but in the middle – I agree that it is to prove his point – he goes into huge details : for instance in this book he talks about how a human mouth produces vowel and consonant sounds for a number of pages. How the mind forms ‘pictures’ of words, phrases etc for another thirty pages. Fascinating stuff if you are a linguist but a trying narrative for a lay person
If at this point you say ‘Don’t read really deep stuff for entertainment, you will find very few in these kind of books’ then I will say ‘touche’. Still I do read books for entertainment and not to learn deep nuances of the subject – for which I will go to academic books if I was so inclined.
After a lot of this stuff, you finally learn one interesting fact. The word orange came from Spanish naranja and was originally norange in english. Then the expression ‘a norange’ morphed into ‘an orange’ and the word became orange. Bill Bryson, in Mother Tongue gives several other examples of this phenomenon.
We also learn to our (or at least my) surprise that the way Americans pronounce mass and pass is not an evolution of English in America but import from regions of Britain. Now Britain has entirely given up that way of speech. Who knew? Also the term mad to mean angry or fall to mean autumn is so characteristically American now; but they were imports from the British Isles as well.
Some nice sentences are given everywhere to show how mind can parse complex sentences easily, as if by nature.
I did not enjoy this as much as I enjoyed other books. Not due to the quality of the writing but because the depth to which he goes in analysis (as he has done in some other books) is way too much for a lay person like me.
4/10
— Krishna