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Language Quotes by Steven Pinker

42 Language quotes by Steven Pinker

All Language quotes Steven Pinker’s page

Steven Pinker notes that language helps us gossip and keep track of who can help whom. He points out that many scientific terms are metaphorical, like calling DNA a code. He also reminds us that words are arbitrary labels, yet they shape the way we think.

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“the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood…

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“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,”

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Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.

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People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

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Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an…

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You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the…

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“I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.”

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Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend…

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I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability…

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As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children.…

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Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the…

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It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical…

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Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They…

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One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for…

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Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by…

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Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they…

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“Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train…

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Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts…

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I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to…

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Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to…

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Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics…

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When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little…

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Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor,…

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“We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear…

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“Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in…

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“Darwin concluded that language ability is “an instinctive tendency to acquire an art,” a design that is not peculiar to humans but…

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Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate…

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I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

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Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language…

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“As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and…

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Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture…

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For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who…

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Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the…

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The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just…

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In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way…

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A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic:…

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Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the…

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People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably…

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An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk…

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I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed…

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More by Steven Pinker

Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much…

Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by…

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless…

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely…

When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock.…

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives…

“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted…

Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,…

In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award…

“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to…

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or…

“In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch.…

Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from…