The podcast delves into the fascinating evolution of language, discussing how it sets humans apart from animals and exploring the infinite possibilities of sentences. It challenges traditional views on language formation, highlighting the intricate structures and patterns essential for learning languages. The exploration of unconscious processing in language comprehension and the importance of preserving linguistic diversity add further depth to the engaging discussion.
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Quick takeaways
Language acquisition involves analyzing into units like nouns and verbs to form new ideas.
The power of language lies in combinatorics, enabling diverse expressions and infinite variations of thoughts.
Deep dives
The Innateness of Language
Language acquisition involves more than just repeating words like a parrot; children analyze language into units like nouns and verbs, forming new ideas. Language is an innate feature of the brain, optimizing its circuitry to extract words and grammatical rules from speech. This innate ability is reinforced by the universal design of language across 6,000 languages, translated through common structures, rules for combining words, and categorizing words into parts of speech like noun and verb.
Evolution and Innateness of Language
The inherent nature of language predates the fragmentation of human cultures over 50,000 years ago. Attempts to trace the evolution of language through anatomical features have limitations. The uniqueness of human language ability lies beyond physical attributes, suggesting abstract structures enabling linguistic capabilities. The origin of language in evolutionary ancestors may have roots in primal calls evolving into linguistic structures.
Combinatorial Nature of Language
Language's unique capability lies in combinatorics, enabling the expression of a vast array of thoughts through word combinations. The power of language transcends simple messages, allowing communication of complex ideas like theories or mundane topics through diverse sentence formations. Combining words exponentially expands the possibilities for conveying thoughts, showcasing language's unparalleled capacity for infinite variations and diverse expressions.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of our ideas about the formation of language. The psychologist George Miller worked out that in English there are potentially a hundred million trillion sentences of twenty words in length - that’s a hundred times the number of seconds since the birth of the universe. “Language”, as Chomsky put it, “makes infinite use of finite media”. “Language”, as Steven Pinker puts it, “comes so naturally to us that it’s easy to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is”. “All over the world”, he writes, “members of our species spend a good part of their lives fashioning their breath into hisses and hums and squeaks and pops and are listening to others do the same”. Jean Jacques Rousseau once said that we differ from the animal kingdom in two main ways - the use of language and the prohibition of incest. Language and our ability to learn it has been held up traditionally as our species’ most remarkable achievement, marking us apart from the animals. But in the 20th century, our ideas about how language is formed are being radically challenged and altered. With Dr Jonathan Miller, medical doctor, performer, broadcaster, author and film and opera director; Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Centre for Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California.
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