Ability Quote by Steven Pinker

You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't happened in evolution.…

— Noam Chomsky

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For…

— Richard Leakey

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each…

— Terence McKenna

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans…

— Temple Grandin

The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing.

— Frans de Waal

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique…

— Daniel Everett

I did not say that language as a completed system emerged in an individual in an instant. But I cannot think of a coherent…

— Noam Chomsky

Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the pop-biology that…

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Steven Pinker

Language would have evolved first as an internal object, a kind of "language of thought" (LOT), with externalisation (hence communication) an ancillary process. I…

— Noam Chomsky

Language was such a profoundly new evolutionary innovation that our brains had to be completely redesigned in order to handle it.

— Leonard Shlain

It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar,…

— Niels Kaj Jerne