i think the reason for that is, i might even invoked darwin more than venha. In the generation to generation transmission process of an irregular verb and you regular verb, has to be memorized. And so you've got an erosion of the stock of irregular verbs as they get filtered through the mind children memorizing them. So dreamt becomes dreamed, for instance. Dreamt reram is prettier. The language itself spontaneously evolves with some balance. There are trade offs. Their multi pll tugs pushes and pulls.
Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.
He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Other ways to connect