Excerpts

Language as a Team Sport

Like so many things, there's a good analogy in the game of baseball. You could see the game as a roster of unique individuals, each with distinct attributes and personality. But a team-oriented view reflects how each player's skills contribute to a collective purpose — each player's role gaining meaning only in relation to others.

Similarly, the constituents of language — words, phrases, and sentences — communicate not as individuals, but as a team. The flow of words may be on automatic pilot, but we're steering the point.

"It was impossible to get a conversation going. Everybody was talking too much."

— Yogi Berra

The Origins of Speech

"Mother-baby talk is a prime suspect when looking for the progenitor of speech. This intimate form of communication follows a simplified set of generative rules, much like speech, but with more repetition and exaggerated contours. The sound of mother-baby talk is remarkably similar across cultures and can be easily recognized regardless of the local dialect."

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."

— Nelson Mandela

The Mystery of the Brain

"Neuroscience for all its technological prowess has progressed only so far in understanding the neural basis of language. We see only vague images, like the lights of a city viewed from an airplane at night. Lights flicker on in this neighborhood or that, but what's going on in the homes, apartments, and businesses below is anybody's guess. We have become adept at locating where language takes place, but its inner workings remain a mystery."