The Language Game
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
What is language? Why do we have it? Why does that matter? Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood. Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways. Drawing on examples from across the world the book explains -- How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech. Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers. Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied -- and why no two people speak quite the same language.
Reviews with the most likes.
Fascinating. This is a book that basically argues that Noam Chomsky had some great ideas, but ultimately was quite a bit wrong and quite a bit off. And yes, that is an oversimplification explicitly designed (by me) to hook you into reading this book while also giving you an idea of the ultimate direction here. The authors are consistently afraid of “anarchy” even while actually touting its exact benefits - their entire argument is that language (and humanity) evolve best and most usefully outside of the bounds of rules (and thus outside the bounds of rulers - and since the literal definition of “anarchy” is “without rulers”... ;) ). Which is where they ultimately come into conflict with Chomsky's ideas of a universal language and a universal grammar machine. For someone that is decently educated but well outside the specific field at hand (Bachelor of Science in Computer Science), I found this to be a solid examination of the topic in language that I could easily follow- whenever technical discussions within the field were at hand, Christiansen and Chater did a solid job of using their running metaphor of a game of charades to explain the differences and similarities in what they were describing using a system that so many of us know fairly well and can relate to very easily. As I said in the title here, truly a fascinating book, one anyone “of the word” - and thus, any reader, since we are all people “of the word” - should read. Very much recommended.
