A Review Of Language Instinct
By Ayele Teklemariam
It is important to note that all the quotes in the following article are from a book by Steven Pinker “on the language instinct” and should be credited as such and for any demerits mistakes, misrepresentations or misquotes the full responsibility is mine.
“Finally since language is the product of a well engineered biological instinct, we shall see that it is not the nutty barrel of monkeys that entertainer-columnists make it out to be.” I looked at languages and communications between human beings and it rather seemed that language emerged out of the need to give and take to and from the other. As the number of the items and the number of the individuals that needed to take and give increases and the paths the items to be given and taken increases, there arose the need to sophisticate the language in manners and ways to transverse the same distance and through the same intricate paths.
As evolutionarily as evolution itself at each stage and at every encounter consciously and rationally coined and agreed on. As such it seems rather a conscious act than it is a biological instinct. The ability to generate a sound of frequencies, pitches, wavelengths and amplitudes of the known ranges, sings and gestures and the need to communicate may be smart biological engineering, but language itself is a conscious effort of the use of these capabilities.
“The conception of language as a kind of instinct was first articulated in 1871 by Darwin himself. In THE DESCENT OF MAN he had to contend with language because of its confinement to humans seemed to present a challenge to his theory.” It is rather the reference to the confinement of language to humans that throw me a little off balance and made me look at the issue from a different angle. It would be rather a bit naive it seems that other animals do not communicate African killer bees when touched spreading the new and run to kill with hurray specific to a war cry and dispatch in a kamikaze army of fighters. Or the Hyenas cry of summons for a mill upon finding a Caracas of a kill. Or the love songs of different birds and insects and flies, have no language may be a little far fetched. May be rudimentary yet language enough with its own rules and specificity of usage as grammar is to us to communicate an event, a need from and a need to dependent on the level of social and mental development relative to that of ours (humans).
“As no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake or write. More over no philologist now supposes that any language has been deliberately invented” It is important to bear in mind that our eyes may have been exposed to light days after we were born at about seven days, but were we exposed to sound after or before we were born? Could we have been hearing sound and particularly conversations of our mothers and any and every one that she had conversed with after our ears and all our bodily audio mechanism were formed? Is it possible that our ears got exposed to audio sound and audio conversation ahead of videos communication? We might have been susceptible to audio sound than we are of visible light even while we were in our mother’s wombs. Having said that would it be then possible that children are more inclined to verbalize more efficiently than may show the “instinctive” tendency to cook or bake and brew, for they are visually acquired learning processes and skills.
Lastly what we rule out as instinctive may not be as instinctive as we believe it to be. It was a day after I had jotted down this note that I met a PhD. from Ghana on the bus home from an outing who teaches English in one of the US high schools and ask him how he was able to teach as a foreigner with such a heavy wall cracking accent children their own native language, The answer was not so complicated to him as it sounded to me. He simply told me it is the rules of the language that I teach, without the rules they might communicate, but they might as well communicate with a sign which would have been inept to explain and recognize the cultural, social, economic and technical sophistication of the past, present and the future. The implications are clear that I need no further explanations. Every trained body tends to execute what he or she is trained to do as instinctively as instinctive response can be, while others that are not so trained will have to think and think twice before acting on the same issue, act, or an activity.
Are instinctive responses that need no rationalization because their truth has been established in the mind of the actor that rationalizing would be unimportant and the response is clear and uncompromisingly predetermined while a conscious responses is pretty dynamic, flexible and variable dependent? A conscious act that is repeated and repeated over many a times becomes an act that is acted on without being thought about as though it is ingrained in the genes of the actor. After all what is ingrained in our genes are repetitious resistive and adaptive acts forced upon them, you and us by the needs and demands of our surrounding or environment.
When do we begin to react and be stimulated by sound? Would that have something to do for children’s instinctive tendency to “deliberately create language?” Verbalize prior to visualize.
“Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses: the brain must contain a recipe of program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words.” If I may say that seems suggestive that language is learned and gradually developed out of the needs to and from than it is a deliberate invention devoid of need. While deliberate invention predates need and use, language does not seem to predate use and need but to fulfill it. There does not seem that there is a chicken and egg argument here, but an A to B straight-line relationship.
“And Chomsky’s arguments about the nature of the language faculty are based on technical analysis of word and sentence structure, often couched in abstruse formalisms.” Language is a result of a need to give and take to the other, self, and from as such it is a result of a constant negotiation and agreement which has to be kept and observed, and to that end it has to be told and retold, read and re-read to generations. It is to me this repetitious propagation of the agreements reached and the negotiations conducted that what Chomsky referred to as abstruse formalist couching. If that is he wouldn’t have been far from the truth I see in my untrained layman’s views.
“The great majority of sentences were grammatical, especially in working class speech, with higher percentage of grammatical sentences in working-class speech. The higher percentage of ungrammatical sentences was found in the proceedings of learned academic conferences.” The recognition of the existence of a language difference between those that are learned and not may be in order considering the sentences made about Plato walking Among Macedonian herdsmen as far as language is concerned. “There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as Stone Age language. When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the headhunter savages of Assam.”
Thou it is clear from the outset that language carries a badge of class distinction the psychology that contributed to the grammatical discrepancy between the workingman and the academic will not pass without grabbing a due attention and beg for an explanation. Technicality and logicality, adherence and experiment, instinct and rational, seem to be in conflict at or at least at odds here than it is enlightenment and ignorance or wealth and poverty that are on opposing sides of the presumed or real issue. The working man is engaged in a rigorous repetitive work in his day-to-day activity, for him mistakes are costly that could throw him in to the darkness that he is not prepared to deal with, his sphere and peripheral vision may be is limited to the known and long been established, contrary to the academic who is in constant search and who is an adventurer in the wilderness of the unknown in search of answers and new findings, whose sphere is not limited to what is known and established, and is often in constant touch with new and the unknown and yet to be established. He is not more technical, but logical, and grammar is not logical than it is technical, it is by enlarge to be learned than it is to be deduced or rationalized. Is it any wonder then that our work and the environment we find ourselves in manifests itself in many ways including in our grammatical usage?
“Necessity being the mother of invention, language could have been invented by resourceful people a number of times long ago; —– Universal grammar would simply reflect the Universal limitations on human information processing. All languages words for “water” and “foot” because all people need to refer to water and feet. No language has word a million syllables long for no person would have the time to say it. It is the word and the essence of invention of a language that is of importance and may be worth the energy and discussion time here. It is rather a similar and like the ongoing discussion between evolution and creation, natural language seems to evolve over time in response to the human development and the division of labor that the complexity and enormity of human development brought about. It might have been helped and enhanced by the deep need to complain, but complaints would have done much in a society devoid of division of labor, in which case the complainer and the complaint addressee would be the same.
Division of labor did not only help develop language it indeed helped develop languages with in languages, sub cultures within cultures, like the technical terminologies of the medical doctor to the engineer, the pharmacist to the lawyer and other variances the convergence of languages in divergence of technical languages as specializations continue to divide and subdivide disciplines in to sub-disciplines in direct proportion to our growth in number.The point here is to note that as our journey forward in the universe in our forward developmental path the path seems to narrow like a light that projects forward and in for the depth we gain we give in width. Unlike the inventions language need coinage and convention and agreement, often inventions are real objective existences that need no conventional agreement but introduction of its reality and convincing of its reality, its naming may be conventional, but its reality an alterable fact that makes the naming a language and the creation an invention. I see a clear dichotomy between the two. As much as language as a creation of human ingenuity,it evolved over time that enables it to shape and reshape instantaneously in response to dynamic needs of society and propagate generating acceptance.
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