Linguistic Development Quotes

Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

When younger, I thought one of the particulars of being "Homo sapiens" was to communicate. I have not learned not to, though I am cautious when I try.

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.

To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.

The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior.

Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language.

Language was invented because of the deep human need to complain.

Language is a living thing

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 other.

Learning to speak, therefore, and the power it brings of intelligent converse with others, is a most impressive further step along the path of independence ... Learning to walk is especially significant, not only because it is supremely complex, but because it is done in the first year of life.

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development

Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

Children pick up words as pigeons peas And utter them again as God shall please.

The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Obstreperous, ‘huh,” said Tad. “I see you’ve been using that Big Word of the Day calendar I got you last Christmas.” “That is irrefragable,” I told him solemnly.

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

Words aren't made — they grow,' said Anne.