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Linguistics Enthusiast

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The Sound of Silence
—Steven Pinker

The sounds of language, then, are put together in several steps. A
finite inventory of phonemes is sampled and permuted to define
words, and the resulting strings of phonemes are then massaged to
make them easier to pronounce and understand before they are actually
articulated.
I can’t say anything about it. It’s all.

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Words, words, words
—Steven Pinker

So what’s in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.

[Overton @overton_news]

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte PRAISES President Trump for decisive action in Iran, calling it “CRUCIAL” for the entire world if reports that Iran can strike as far as Diego Garcia are confirmed.

RUTTE: “We are looking into that. But if this would be true, it is the more evidence what the president is doing here, taking out the ballistic missile capability, taking out the nuclear capability from Iran, is crucial.”

“And exactly as the ambassador just said, Ambassador Waltz, we have seen with North Korea if we negotiate for too long, you might pass the moment when you can still get things done and North Korea now has the nuclear capability.”

“If Iran would have the nuclear capability including together with missile capability, it would be a direct threat to Israel and to the region and to Europe and to the stability in the world.”

“So the president doing this is crucial.”

“And I have seen the polling. But I really hope the American people will be with him because he is doing this to make the whole world safer.”

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How language works
__Steven Pinker
The first principle, articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is “the arbitrariness of the sign,” the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning.

The second trick behind the language instinct is captured in a phrase from Wilhelm Von Humboldt that presaged Chomsky: language“makes infinite use of finite media.”

That is, we use a code to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts. That code, or set of rules, is called a generative grammar.

A grammar is an example of a “discrete combinatorial system.” A finite number of discrete elements (in this case, words) are sampled,combined, and permuted to create larger structures (in this case,sentences) with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements.

Another noteworthy discrete combinatorial system in the natural world is the genetic code in DNA, where four kinds of nucleotides are combined into sixty-four kinds of codons,and the codons can be strung into an unlimited number of different genes. Many biologists have capitalized on the close parallel between the principles of grammatical combination and the principles of genetic combination.

Most of the complicated systems we see in the world, in contrast,are blending systems, like geology, paint mixing, cooking, sound, light,and weather. In a blending system the properties of the combination lie between the properties of its elements, and the properties of the elements are lost in the average or mixture.

Many biologists believe that if inheritance were not discrete, evolution as we know it could not have taken place.

The fact that grammar is a discrete combinatorial system has two important consequences. The first is the sheer vastness of language. The second consequence of the design of grammar is that it is a code that is autonomous from cognition. A grammar specifies how words may combine to express meanings; that specification is independent of the particular meanings we typically convey or expect others to convey to us. Thus we all sense that some strings of words that can be given common-sense interpretations do not conform to the grammatical code of English. The opposite can happen as well. Sentences can make no sense but can still be recognized as grammatical.

Some psychologists have suggested that human language is based on a huge word chain stored in the brain. The idea is congenial to stimulus-response theories: a stimulus elicits a spoken word as a response, then the speaker perceives his or her own response, which serves as the next stimulus, eliciting one out of several words as the next response, and so on. There are three problems, and each one illuminates some aspect of how language really does work.First, a sentence of English is a completely different thing from a string of words chained together according to the transition probabilities of English. The discrepancy between English sentences and Englishy word chains has two lessons. When people learn a language, they are learning how to put words in order, but not by recording which word follows which other word. They do it by recording which word category—noun, verb, and so on—follows which other category. The second lesson is that the nouns and verbs and adjectives are not just hitched end to end in one long chain; there is some overarching blueprint or plan for the sentence that puts each word in a specific slot.

The difference between the artificial combinatorial system we see in word-chain devices and the natural one we see in the human brain is summed up in a line from the Joyce Kilmer poem: “Only God can make a tree.” A sentence is not a chain but a tree. In a human grammar, words are grouped into phrases, like twigs joined in a branch. The phrase is given a name—a mental symbol—and little phrases can be joined into bigger ones.
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@JimFergusonUK

[Fox News @FoxNews]

IRAN'S REP TO THE UN: “I have one word only: I advise to the representative of the United States to be polite. It will be better for yourself and the country you represent.”

MIKE WALTZ: “I'm not going to dignify this with another response, especially, as this representative sits here, in this body, representing a regime that has killed tens of thousands of its own people and imprisoned many more simply for wanting freedom from your tyranny."

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Mentalese

1. Indeed, humans the world over (and babies and monkeys, for that matter) color their perceptual worlds using the same palette, and this constrains the vocabularies they develop.
2. It is no wonder that many commentators have trouble even conceiving of thought without words— or is it that they just don't have the language to talk about it?
3. Many creative people insist that in their most inspired moments, they think not in words but in mental images.
4. What sense, then, can we make of the suggestion that images, numbers, kinship relations, or logic can be represented in the brain without being couched in words?
5. These examples illustrate a single important point. The representation underlying thinking, on the one hand, and the sentence in a language, on the other, are in many ways at cross-purposes.
6. People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought.
7. Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa.
8. So where does all this leave Newspeak? Here are my predictions for the year 2050. First, since mental life goes on independently of particular languages, concepts of freedom and equality will be thinkable even if they are nameless. Second, since there are far more concepts than there are words, and listeners must always charitably fill in what the speaker leaves unsaid, existing words will quickly gain new senses, perhaps even regain their original senses. Third, since children are not content to reproduce any old input from adults but create a complex grammar that can go beyond it, they would creolize Newspeak into a natural language, possibly in a single generation.

The twenty-first-century toddler may be Winston Smith’s revenge.

—Steven Pinker.

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Chatterboxes

1. No mute tribe has ever been discovered,and there is no record that a region has served as a “cradle” of language from which it spread to previously languageless groups.

2. The universality of complex language is a discovery that fills linguists with awe, and is the first reason to suspect that language is not just any cultural invention but the product of a special human instinct.

3. There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language. Earlier in this century the anthropological linguist Edward Sapir wrote, “When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam."

4. Ordinary speech, like color vision or walking, is a paradigm of engineering excellence—a technology that works so well that the user takes its outcome for granted, unaware of the complicated machinery hidden behind the panels.

5. The crux of the argument is that complex language is universal because children actually reinvent it, generation after generation—not because they are taught, not because they are generally smart, not because it is useful to them, but because they just can't help it.

6. Children deserve most of the credit for the language they acquire. In fact, we can show that they know things they could not have been taught.

7. One of Chomsky’s classic illustrations of the logic of language involves the process of moving words around to form questions. The real rule for forming questions does not look for the first occurrence of the auxiliary word as one goes from left to right in the string; it looks for the auxiliary that comes after the phrase labeled as the subject. This phrase, containing the entire string of
words a unicorn that is eating a flower, behaves as a single unit. The first is sits deeply buried in it, invisible to the question-forming rule. The second is, coming immediately after this subject noun phrase, is the one that is moved. Chomsky reasoned that if the logic of language is wired into children, then the first time they are confronted with a sentence with two auxiliaries they should be capable of turning it into a question with the proper wording. For Chomsky, this kind of reasoning, which he calls “the argument from the poverty of the input,'' is the primary justification for saying that the basic design of language is innate. The particular ways that languages do form questions are
arbitrary, species-wide conventions; we don’t find them in artificial systems like computer programming languages or the notation of mathematics. The universal plan underlying languages, with auxiliaries and inversion rules, nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, phrases and clauses, case and agreement, and so on, seems to suggest a commonality in the brains of speakers, because many other plans would have been just as useful. Evidence corroborating the claim that the mind contains blueprints for grammatical rules comes, once again, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings… these show clearly that language acquisition cannot be explained as a kind of imitation.

8. If language is an instinct, it should have an identifiable seat in the brain, and perhaps even a special set of genes that help wire it into place.

9. They show that complex grammar is displayed across the full range of human habitats. You don’t need to have left the Stone Age; you don’t need to be middle class; you don’t need to do well in school; you don’t even need to be old enough for school. Your parents need not bathe you in language or even command a language. You don’t need the intellectual wherewithal to function in society, the skills to keep house and home together, or a particularly firm grip on reality. Indeed, you can possess all these advantages and still not be a competent language user, if you lack just the right genes or just the right bits of brain.

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1.Simply by making noises with your mouths,we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each others,and this makes our communication even more impressive by bridging gaps of time,space,and acquaintanceship.

2. Language is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.

—Steven Pinker.

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https://t.co/sShftJGAQB

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I feel the power of God conveyed through her speech.

[The Patriot Oasis™ @ThePatriotOasis]

🚨BREAKING: Erika Kirk has a MESSAGE for ALL of the MEN around the world watching.

"To all of the men watching around the world, accept Charlie's challenge, and embrace true manhood."

"Be strong and courageous for your families. Love your wives and lead them. Love your children and protect them. Be the spiritual head of your home. But please be a leader worth following."

"Your wife is not your servant. Your wife is not your employee. Your wife is not your slave. She is your helper. You are not rivals. You are one flesh working together for the glory of god."

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@elonmusk

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@elonmusk So, I'm immortal.

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@LauraLoomer Why not? Would JEF bomb BBB like the B-2 did?

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I still want to understand what was happening!

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@cb_doge Happy birthday🎂🎉@elonmusk.