One highly fascinating inquiry into language and human nature that the Forum has missed presenting here all this time is Steven Pinker’s 2007 book,
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Viking Adult, 512 pages). With scientific depth and with persuasive if sometimes quirkish verbal eloquence, Pinker—a Canadian experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author—argues that language explains our nature as humans and that our choice of words tells a lot about our individual mindsets and emotional states.
“There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words,” Pinker says in
The Stuff of Thought. “There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will. These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same. They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic.”
Pinker then makes wide-ranging, highly entertaining forays into such aspects of language as who actually wrote William Shakespeare’s plays, how the power of words to soak up emotional coloring imbues them with connotations and denotations, and how to appreciate the role of verb constructions in language by pondering jokes that hinge on an ambiguity between them.
Says noted British linguist and author David Crystal in a review of
The Stuff of Thought in the
Financial Times: “This is Steven Pinker at his best—theoretical insight combined with clear illustration and elegant research summary, presented throughout with an endearing wit and linguistic creativity which has become his hallmark.”
Read William Saletan’s “The Double Thinker,” a review of Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, in The New York Times now! Read an excerpt from Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought in Newsweek.com now! Watch a TED video of Steven Pinker giving a talk on “What our language habits reveal,” an abstract from his book The Stuff of ThoughtABOUT THE AUTHOR:Steven Pinker, a leading authority on language and the mind, is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. A recipient of several major awards for his teaching, books, and scientific research, he is the author of several popular and highly praised books, among them
The Stuff of Thought,
The Blank Slate,
Words and Rules,
How the Mind Works, and T
he Language Instinct. He writes for
The New York Times,
Time,
The New Republic, and other magazines.
OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:Tough defending the German tongue. In “The Sound of Difference: Why we find some languages more beautiful than others,” an article in the March 4, 2014 issue of
TheSmartSet.com, German writer and book author Bernd Brunner writes of how he found himself in the position of trying to defend the German language but soon had to give up since no one seemed inclined to change their entrenched opinion. “People often describe German, my native language, as hard and aggressive,” Brunner says. “They relish criticizing its guttural sounds, long compound words, and the sentence structure, which is said to be especially complex… I asked myself if this condemnation springs from envy at Germany’s economic success and dominance within Europe, or perhaps the memory of Adolf Hitler’s voice in his ranting speeches. Such a reaction would be understandable and only human.”
Read Bernd Brunner’s “The Sound of Difference” in TheSmartSet.com now! The rewarding power of repetition. In “One more time: Why do we listen to our favourite music over and over again?”, an article in the
Aeon Magazine website, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, a music cognition lab director at the University of Arkansas, says that we do so because repeated sounds work magic in our brains. “The stunning prevalence of repetition in music all over the world is no accident,” Margulis argues. “Repetitiveness actually gives rise to the kind of listening that we think of as musical. It carves out a familiar, rewarding path in our minds, allowing us at once to anticipate and participate in each phrase as we listen.”
Read Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis’s “One more time” in the Aeon.co website now!
