On "Breaking the Maya Code" by Michael Coe **

This book would have come much earlier on the psycholinguists list if I'd been able to get a copy. It's been on constant loan from the library since I started the list. It forges a rather odd ending to the list, for the material is really about deciphering an ancient script, a language, something that would have fit in more with the history of reading sections of the list.

The language that is being deciphered is ancient Maya. Coe's book is an account of how it happened and why it took so long. As an entertaining read, it was a bit on the slow and name-dropping side for me; as history, it focuses mostly on the academicians involved and not so much on the history that is gleaned after the code is cracked. I was thinking the book might be like Richard Rhodes's "Making of the Atom Bomb," but I didn't find myself as invested in the discoveries that were awaiting the archaeologists, linguists, and art historians who finally put the pieces together as I was in the physicists who somehow managed to break apart an atom for the first time.

Coe starts off well enough with his first chapter, which explains some of the basics about different writing systems and about language systems, much of which was covered in other books on my list. Still, this was the most interesting part of the book to me. Maya, it was assumed, was ideographic. That is, each symbol stood for a word--much as some think of Chinese or of Egyptian hieroglyphics. But Coe points out that, while such languages may have started as ideographic on some level, they are really logographic. Logographic languages, if I understand correctly, work with symbols for combining ideas, along with some phonetic and syllabic symbols. Purely syllabic languages have a symbol for each morpheme, and phonetic languages have symbols for each phoneme.

At one point, ancient Egyptian was thought to be ideographic as well, but in fact a scholar named Champollion was able to prove in the nineteenth century that the symbols in the writing actually had a function similar to those in Chinese. Hence, for example, an "eye" symbol wasn't necessarily an eye, but perhaps the sound "eye" or the syllable "ide" or the concept of "high" (I'm making these up--if only to note the point). Mayan, it turns out, works on a similar principle. But whereas Champollion took two years to crack the code, Mayan scholars would take over one hundred. Why?

Champollion had better resources: he had the Rosetta stone and some careful preserved artifacts to review. Mayan scholars didn't.

But in fact, they did. One writer from the early Spanish conquest had written out the Mayan syllabary. Scholars, however, assumed he couldn't possibly have been telling things as they actually were. And here, I suppose, is the interesting part of Coe's story--the crux of the tragedy. Mayan wasn't decoded, it turns out, not because materials weren't present but, first, because of preconceptual prejudices and, second, because of academic egos.

An ancient non-Western "barbarian" culture couldn't possibly have had real writing, some great thinkers assumed. Others thought Native Americans prone to mystical thought--not likely to actually bother writing down events around them. Further, the signs themselves--folks assumed--must be ideographic. And so it goes, working with such assumptions, those trying to decipher were blinded by their own preconceptions.

But even worse, they were blinded by each other. One scholar in particular comes off quite badly. So important was it to be right about his own interpretations that when the true answers--that the script in fact had phonetic and syllabic components mixed into it--were exposed he mocked them. And by reputation, his use of mockery transferred to virtually all others in the field. And such competition, Coe points out, continues up to the writing of his book, wherein archaeologists, angry at dollars being given to linguists, downplay the need to "read" what the inscriptions actually say. Each academic is so concerned with his or her own field and reputation that the work of others is run down, and progress on the subject of the Maya is stunted.

Coe's, then, is a book about closed-minded thinking and academic ego, something that unfortunately is all too familiar many in university settings, as well as to many in the political arena. Truth doesn't matter as much as being "right"--even if one is wrong.

On "How to Speak Dog" by Stanley Coren ****

So do animals speak languages? When you ask people who are animal lovers, the answer seems to be yes. Coren makes the case that dogs have a language in this book. Now, it's not like a human language. He calls it a simple language (akin to a very small child's), as much dependent on gesture and body language as on sound. He makes this case because animals manage to communicate meaningful things to each other, because they can talk about things not in the current setting (e.g., calling the pack together), because they have a rudimentary grammar (a growl followed by a bark may have a different meaning than a bark followed by a growl, and certain gestures never accompany certain kinds of sounds). Granted, you're not going to get a dog to talk about philosophy, but then, Coren says, you won't get most people to talk about that either: more than two-thirds of what we say has to do with social interaction, which is what a dog's speech is confined to.

But these are the conclusions of Coren's book. Most of the book is not devoted to arguing these points but rather to delineating for us humans just what dogs are saying when they put a hand on our knee or bark at a cat. And in this Coren has some absolutely fascinating subject matter. Individual chapters go into the meaning of different sounds, scents, and of various sets of gestures--with the tail, the ears, the eyes, the face, and the body. Much of dog speech has to do with establishing who's boss and who is going to follow, and as Coren points out, is primarily about heading off a fight rather than getting involved in one. Hence, if a dog looks away, it is taking a subordinate role as opposed to one who continues to stare.

This has implications for how we as humans deal with dogs as well. Coren has some cool anecdotes, the most memorable to me being one in which a dog would continually come and sit on the couch next to a woman when her husband was gone. The dog would put his heavy head on the woman's lap along with a paw. He seemed to want constant affection, but he was heavy and hot and tiresome. She'd move over to make room for him, but he'd move again to be on her. Coren pointed out that in fact the dog was not looking for affection. It was claiming that it was the boss, demonstrating that it ruled the house when the woman's husband was gone. In another case of misunderstanding, a dog would continually wet the floor when a man came home, though it didn't wet the floor otherwise. Obviously, the dog was being disrespectful and hateful--or so it might seem. In fact, in dog language, it was trying to show its submissiveness to the man, as in I'm so like a little puppy around you that I can't even control my bowels, so don't beat me up.

An interesting discussion regards the gesture of pointing, which dogs do differently than humans. Dogs tend to look at the pointer when we use our hands rather than at the thing that is being pointed at. In dog speak, the way to point is with one's body, by turning one's head, just as a dog would point with other dogs. Coren believes this has, in part, to do with dogs less satisfactory eyesight.

Later chapters explore some tidbits on dogs and scent (they have something like four to five times the number of scent receptors that humans do, which explains why they can distinguish scents so much better than we can, making up for shortages in sight), on differing dialects among dogs, of dogs and cats, and of attempts to teach dogs human language. The dogs and cats section shows how cats in fact have their own gestural language that, in many ways, differs from dogs. Hence, this can lead to conflict, especially when the dog or cat has not grown up in a mixed home. Take, for example, rolling over to expose the belly. In a dog, this is a move showing submission; in a cat, this is an attack pose.

The chapter on dogs learning human language focuses mostly on apes, since that's where most research has actually been done. Primates, as the author points out, hold a lot more promise in this regard because of their greater dexterity with regard to hands. However, in the 1960s, Elisabeth Mann Borgese did try to train her dog Arli to use a keyboard to type out requests and demands, starting first with words and then moving to individual letters. Eventually, he learned to count to four and to type the words dog, cat, arlie, bird, ball, and bone. But was it really language? There is a humorous passage regarding submission of his poetry to a literary journal, which compared his work to e e cummings and encouraged Arli to continue in his pursuits.

On "Animal Talk" by Tim Friend ****

Tim Friend asks us to think about language as the animals speak it rather than as we speak it. When we do that, the possibility that the animals actually talk to one another seems like a given, and language no longer seems simply like the domain of human beings. Of course, this language takes different forms: dances, smells, songs, barks, howls, clicks, beeps, and a whole lot of other things I've forgotten to list here. In essence, though, animal language, Friend says, comes down to four things, which are shared with us humans: sex, real estate, who's boss, and what's for dinner. Whether one is convinced of Friend's point or not, Animal Talk is a fascinating book on biology and communication in other species.

Each chapter is arranged around a theme that Friend delves into in greater depth using a range of particular creatures to demonstrate the particular kind of communication that he wishes to demonstrate. One chapter focuses on the metal abilities of animals, one on their emotions; others focus on the aforementioned sex, real estate, and leadership. Still others focus on song and dance. Still, the book, while easy to follow, is pings between so many interesting facts that it's hard to summarize.

Cool anecdotes that come to mind include the following: In one experiment with birds in which they were given hooks and sticks to obtain food, the birds found the hooks easiest to work with and so ditched the sticks. However, a dominant bird stole the hook from a less powerful bird, leaving this other bird to have to use sticks. The surprising part? This other bird not only used the stick--it fashioned the stick into a hook by twisting it against a cage of some sort. Friend's point? That animals are capable of some creative thinking.

A newspaper reported that a raven called for a long while in the sky before a woman noticed the raven in her backyard. She also noted then that the raven was looking into the bush, and when she saw what was in the bush, she knew why--it was a wildcat. Luckily, her husband was in close range so that she could call for help. The raven had tried to warn her, she realized. Well, not quite, Friend notes. More likely, the raven had actually brought the wildcat to feast on the woman. The calls had likely been to get the cats attention and to draw it near. Friend's point? Animals can communicate across species and can work together to achieve ends. (In this case, the bird would have been the lucky diner on what was left after the wildcat's meal.)

Other interesting facts revolve around sound and song. The best time for singing, as it turns out, if one is a bird wanting one's mating call to carry far is at dusk and dawn. That's when the sound waves in the air travel farthest due to something to do with the way the atmosphere works--and that's why you hear birds chittering so much at those times, all of them on their own frequency so that they can tune out the frequency of other species and hear only the calls that are to them. But birds aren't the only one's who sing. Whales and other sea creatures do too, but while some terrestrial songs might travel sixty miles, whale songs, buried in sound-conducive water, can travel a thousand or more.

Songs aren't the only way that creatures attract or call for mates, however. Some birds jump in place to attract mates. And some, like the bower bird, build elaborate nests (akin to baskets) and wait for the mate to inspect it. If the nest passes the mate's discerning eye, the bird will get laid.

Friend closes with discussions of talk among sea creatures. It seems that dolphins have unique names (in the form of whistles), just as you and I do, whether that be John or Jacob and Suzie. Dolphins, Friend says, are the only known creatures outside of humans who do this in nature. (That animals know one another uniquely--or are capable of giving names--I think is well established among creatures in captivity, as the bonobos and apes and chimpanzees who learn English show in various experiments, and even, to an extent, as our own pets show when they choose out favorite people or favorite other animal buddies.) What other things dolphins are saying to one another we don't know, since we can only get the broad strokes of what certain things mean. This type of whistle is aggressive, this type is submissive, etc. It could be, Friend implies, that such creatures are saying much more to one another than we realize and likely ever will, since we can't vocalize in their tongue (I wouldn't go so far as to say that Friend is saying they're having talks about the meaning of life, but he does seem to imply these talks might be more than "gimme gimme").

There is also the interesting tale of Hoover, the talking seal. Hoover's mother died when it was a baby, so it was raised in a human household--and as a result, rather than learning seal songs, it learned English. Granted, the English it learned was rudimentary--three sentences to the effect of things like "hiya there" and "what's going on?"--but certainly on a par with parrots. In fact, harbor seals have vocal tracts similar to our own and thus should be able to mimic our speech with a fair amount of ease. Hoover eventually was placed in a marine park, where he tried to mate with other seals. Not knowing how to sing, however, he tried to pick up women with lines like, you got it, "Hiya there!" (He eventually succeeded, and at least one of his descendents speaks "English" also.)

Ultimately, anecdotes like this last one tie in to what seems to be Friend's ultimate point, which is that Chomsky and others who believe language is unique to human beings and represents an evolutionary jump are wrong. Friend sees human language as on a continuum that could have easily developed out of the kinds of languages that other animals speak. It is only our anthropomorphism that causes us to think we are so utterly unique that we must have developed special brains to go along with speech somewhere along the way. For me, however, the book mostly a joy of discovery into the ways that each creature was uniquely created with its own way of communicating.

On "Thinking in Pictures" by Temple Grandin ****

Temple Grandin doesn't think in words--she thinks in pictures. She's what is called a high-functioning autistic person. This "disability" is also a great gift. While Grandin grapples with a way of thinking that differs from most of our own, she also is the beneficiary of a way of thinking that allows her to achieve things that few of us can. And that's what this book is about: how Temple thinks, and by extension, how autistic people in general think--and feel and live.

The book is split up into various thematic chapters, including sections on the language, the senses, emotion, romance, medication, animals, genius, and spirituality. On language, Grandin describes her brain as being like a video recorder. She puts things together through a prodigious stockpile of images. Rather than thinking in generalities and moving to specifics, she thinks in specifics and moves to generalities. Say "dog," for example, and she'll think of the first dog she met when she was three years old, and then the dog that lived next door that used to bark at her, and so on. This can create issues, as the stockpile of memories grow, because one has to parse through a lot of images. (Then again, some of us who think in words are at a loss for them at times ourselves.)

She also discusses a common feature that autistic people share, which is hypersensitivity. Sounds, tastes, smells can all make autistic people feel as if they are under attack, because that humming that our electric shaver makes can sound like standing under a jet airplane to one who is autistic. Or the shaving that we do might feel like a gentle tickle to us, while it's as if the skin is being torn off to one who is autistic. These kind of hypersenses mean that effort must be taken to dull the features of our world, either through medication or through such things as softer clothing.

On the emotional level, Grandin seems to point to fear as being the one that overwhelms many like her the most. This is in part what makes it difficult for autistic people to leave structured regimens. Given a rigid way of thinking, they often work best with a plan. By rigid, I mean that many lack the ability to generalize about events to be able to make clear decisions. An autistic person might be taught to look both ways before crossing the street in front of his or her house, but the person won't necessarily equate that lesson to looking before crossing any street.

This hypersensitivity and devotion to structure, however, can also mean that autistic people can concentrate in a much deeper fashion than others, can, one might say, obsess over something. This in turns allows them to do things that most can't, such as, in Grandin's case, to see things as the cattle that she works with see things. Throughout the book, in fact, Grandin compares some things she feels autistic people have in common with animals, and this in turns leads to an interesting discussion on thought, for if what is termed nonthinking in animals is all autistic people are capable of (and some not even capable of that), then how do we claim such humans think at all? What exactly is thought in such a case?

Other things autistic people might be able to do include memorizing phone books (taking a picture in the brain of each page) or visualizing riding on a beam of light (such as Einstein did to craft his theory of relativity). In this sense, an educational system that insists that people be well rounded is a disservice to autistic people, who might be immensely talented in a narrow field of study and incapable of much in other fields. Einstein, who Grandin says may have had a mild form of autism, for example, would never have been allowed to become the genius he is considered to be if he had had to deal with today's educational system. Unable to get through certain classes at college, he worked as a patent office and then dispensed his theory to a science journal in his spare time. Such journals wouldn't be open to "amateurs" today.

The more Grandin discusses autism in the book, however, the more it seems like certain tendencies of autistic people are tendencies in each of us. And in that there is a danger. Early in the text, Grandin shows how difficult it is to diagnose the problem early on, but that, in turn, I think, can also lend to overdiagnosis, a fad of sorts, just as hyperactive disorder has become a diagnosis that a lot of fairly normal kids--that is, energetic kids--have been subjected to. Still, as a study in the phenomenon by one who lives in it each day, Grandin's book is a great read.

On "Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator" by Elspeth Jajdelska **

Manguelo's A History of Reading claimed that silent reading became common in the tenth century. It was an off-the-cuff remark, not very heavily explored, and I suspect he pulled that information from another text. Jajdelska, by contrast, says the switch happened around 1700. But that's is not to say that the two actually disagree. Indeed, silent reading may have been downright strange before the tenth century, but it may not have become more common than reading aloud until the end of the seventeenth. There was, one might say, a tipping point that took centuries to complete. We could, for example, make the same case for reading electronically versus reading in print; there is a revolution taking place, one that began decades ago, that has sped up with the growing use of e-readers, and that may one day become the more common form for reading booklength works. What will that mean for reading, for writing, for the way we conceive of the word?

Jajdelska is exploring a similar theme at a time when printing--and access to printed books--was becoming more commonplace, moving from the domain of the few and educated to the common person. Before the 1700s, most readers had access to very few books. A family might own a handful--or just one, namely, the Bible. As books became more common, more people read privately. Whereas before, people read in groups. Someone read a text at a gathering, to you, to the friends beside you. Now, you can read it to yourself.

Along with this comes a tendency to no longer memorize texts. If one has only a single book and that book is to be presented orally to an audience, then one is likely over time to learn the book by heart as one recites it. This means that things like punctuation aren't as important, since it's the reader who will help the listener know exactly what the author was saying. Likewise, with more access to books, children learn to read in different ways than previously--and also read books specifically geared toward them. The first children's books begin to be published about this time. And the idea of reading for leisure, rather than for moral improvement, also begins to gain ground.

What does all this entail for readers and for the people who write for them? It means that reading moves from being a public act to being a private one, and it means that the reader is no longer a speaker but a hearer. In line with that, texts begin to change shape as well.

Jajdelska sees this different shape, in part, taking place in the punctuation that is used in texts. Jajdelska uses writings from two specific authors to make most of the book's points. This allows for close readings of texts, though, as with all literary criticism, it opens the work up to the potential of arguing something that might apply only to these authors and not to others. (Indeed, the choice of a professional--Addison--and an amateur could set up a discussion also of simply good versus bad writing.) This problem is obfuscated a little by sundry discussions of other writers in brief.

With punctuation, the essential difference is that end punctuation (periods) begins to take greater use than simply commas. The idea is that readers as speakers don't want to pause too long lest someone jump in and interrupt, whereas if one is reading on the page (listening), then one need not worry about long pauses. In fact, such signalling helps a silent reader to "hear" what a speaker would do.

Other discussions involve differences in letter writing (the idea that one writes to an individual, intimately, versus the idea that one writes for the public, as seen in differences of, say, greetings one uses) and in diary keeping (a move toward private diaries meant for no one else versus diaries intended for moral guidance to others; a move from diaries that observe the self to diaries that explore it).

Finally, Jajdelska closes with a discussion of time and place and form of narration before and after the move to silent reading. Some of the arguments I found hard to follow or not wholly convincing--rapid switches in time and/or place supposedly are conducive to reader as speaker but not as hearer--but some of the examples are also telling. One, in particular, that I found really interesting was from an expository book of advice in which the narrator leaves off providing advice to upper-class women to make an aside to those women's maids, as if the two might be in the same room listening: in this case, certainly this is reading not intended for a single audience member (just you and me) but for a crowd.

On the whole, the book provides some interesting ideas to think about, especially as the novel began to take more of the literary center. And I can't help but think about what our current shift in technology may mean for writing in this century.

On "A History of Reading" by Alberto Manguel ***

Published in 1996, Manguel's book, I take it, probably fell toward the beginning of a span of time in history writing when cultural histories were hip. We got books on the history of dust, on the history of salt, on the history of cooking, and other such topics that, in a sense, in their vastness, don't really lend themselves to a concise narrative. And that lack of ability to confine the book to a singular narrative haunts Manguel's attempt here. But it's also why he calls it A History rather than The History.

Rather than following a strictly chronological sequence, Manguel divides his history into themes. Thus, we get chapters on censorship, on reading aloud, on the character of the nerd, on the shape of the book, on places of reading (indoor/outdoor), on writers as readers, on translators as readers, on silent versus oral reading, on the reading brain. As such, the book reads more like a set of discrete essays related to the main subject at hand than as a history, which also makes the book difficult to summarize, for what remains with me is not a story but a mood and a list of random facts. Did you know, for example, that reading aloud was the norm until the tenth century? He shares an anecdote of Saint Augustine's surprise as seeing Saint Ambrose read silently. (Another writer disputes this date, placing the silent reading era as beginning near the end of the seventeenth century. That book, I will be reading next.)

There are wonderful anecdotes and photos. We learn of slaves forbidden to read, lest they turn into rebels. We learn of books considered by the government as terrorist acts (in Argentina in the 1970s). We read of how much a translation can affect the text we receive in our native tongue--how much a translation is really one particular kind of reading. We learn of how readers "make" the text they read. We get the by-now-familiar-to-me discussion of the brain and language, the brain and books. We see pictures like the one of a library after the bombing of London, the ceiling missing, the windows blown out, the people still walking among the stacks, examining the undamaged books on their shelves.

And there is history here. Manguel offers a brief rendition of the supposed start of reading (in receipts for bills of sale), in the advantages that reading offered (the messenger no longer having to be present), in the disadvantages that worried philosophers (in the way in which memories would become lazy), and in the introduction of punctuation (especially for the purpose of allowing silent readers). But if straightforward history is what you're looking for, this may not be the best book to peruse.

It's almost as if Manguel gave up on a single narrative line because he doesn't believe there can be. In his final chapter, he offers us a hypothetical book called The History of Reading. He outlines the book's chapters and closes by denoting that the end of the book is blank because it can never be finished. One might even say that it can't really even be started. In that, Manguel expresses something that seems Borgesian in tone, and Jorge Luis Borges's influence seems to be all over this book, for Manguel, we learn early on, was the blind Borges's reader at a younger age.

On "Nim Chimpsky" by Elizabeth Hess *****

More a biography of a research animal than a text on linguistics, Hess's book is an incredibly moving account of one of the chimpanzees used in the ongoing experiments in which primates are taught a human language. The findings may be fascinating, but the cost to the chimp seem formidable.

Nim was the subject of an experiment conducted by Herbert Terrace at NYU. Unlike previous chimp experiments, Terrace's project aimed to have Nim raised like a human being, while at the same time learning a new language. For this purpose, Nim was brought--at eleven days old--to New York from his earlier home in Oklahoma. His mother, we learn in the book, was used to having babies snatched from her after a week or so (in order to farm them out to waiting circuses, scientists, and "pet" enthusiasts), and she guarded Nim jealously for the short time that she was allowed to keep him. Alas, she was put to sleep, and her chimp taken so that the experiment could begin.

Terrace chose an upper-class family in Manhattan to serve as Nim's. The family was a kind of Brady Bunch, the merging of two former families. The dad, W. E. R. LaForge was from a family with inherited wealth. He'd been formerly married to a woman who, in the book's account, essentially doted on him, while he worked away in his highly conformist role. But he had a mid-aged breakdown when the 1970s rolled around, and off he went, adopting a kind of hippie lifestyle, and to that end, he joined up with another woman who also left her husband and whose own lifestyle was more in keeping with the new person that the LaForge had become. The problem: she was also highly interested in Terrace's experiment (being a former student of his), and she agreed to take in the chimp. LaForge had no real way to disagree if he wanted to keep his new wife, and not only that, he ended up paying most of the bills.

We watch over the course of that first year or so, the LaForge family break apart under the stress of keeping the chimp. And in this is the great irony. Nim breaks up many a family and a relationship along the way. He throws tantrums. He bites. He is, in many ways awful, but people love him, because he is "almost human."

Terrace needs hard numbers, so he begins insisting on training Nim in a more typical classroom manner, much to the disagreement of Ms. LaForge. The project stalls; she leaves. New "parents" take over, and then again, after another set of months, another new set of parents take over. Taking care of a chimp is stressful, and each time, the scientist doing the language experiment (who needs hard data to get grants) seems up against the family taking care of the chimp (who just want to get along).

In the end, after Nim takes a chunk out of the face of one his teacher's, Terrace decides to end the experiment. And Nim is returned to the Oklahoma facilities from which he came but at which he has never actually lived.

It is a far cry from his past surroundings. In Oklahoma, Nim lives in a cage among chimps, whereas he's grown up living in a house, among humans. The transition is stressful, though he manages to come through it all right.

Meanwhile, Terrace, who seemed bound to convince people that Nim can talk, actually comes out with a paper saying that his experiment failed and that chimps cannot usefully use language. This rather surprises many surrounding Nim. On Nim's return to Oklahoma, it's apparent that he knows how to sign, and he does it in a manner that is more fluid than most primates that have been trained, and furthermore he does it on his own initiative, in order to begin conversations. Then again, what does he really mean? As one person noted, after being bitten, Nim kept signing "bite." She had no idea whether he was trying to say sorry or whether he was threatening to bite again. We're not talking significant strings of words here.

Still, in a turnaround of sympathy, one ends up feeling a bit for Terrace. And in this is one of the book's interesting observations. To Hillix and Rumbaugh, Roger Fouts (the owner of Washoe, who also worked for a time in Oklahoma) is an absolute hero; William Lemmon, the owner of the IPS, the primate research facility, is an absolutely evil man. To Hess, those distinctions aren't so clear. Fouts at times comes across as more interested in his research than the chimps; Lemmon, a problematic figure to be sure, comes across as a person who at least has some concern for his animals--and a hard sense of just how much they aren't human and so much be treated as such at times to avoid injury. And Terrace, the cold scientist, is one of those who comes to Nim's rescue, when Lemmon, in financial straits, has to start selling off his primates to medical researchers.

Nim is shipped off to a place that is testing hepatitis vaccines. Terrace, along with a man named Bob Ingersoll and a few others, raise a ruckus, and get Nim shipped back to Oklahoma and eventually adopted by an animal refuge. The problem is that the refuge isn't used to handling chimps, and so Nim's first year there is rather a depressing time for him, cooped in a cage by himself. But finally, wisdom prevails, and someone finally gets the refuge's managers to understand that chimps are social animals and need to be among others--and so more chimps are adopted to give Nim a family.

Throughout it all, Nim continues signing, though less so with age, since fewer humans will sign back. He even teaches some of the other chimps to sign. It is a strange world that Nim inhabits. And I'm not sure, since he's cooped up in a cage, that it's a pleasant one. By teaching such animals language, we are, I suppose, opening the gateway to questions about experiments on animals in general. Just how much is the experiment worth, especially when it makes an animal unable to live in the wild but also unable to live among us?

On "Animal Bodies, Human Minds," by W. A. Hillix and Duane Rumbaugh ****

This book serves as a fascinating introduction to animal language acquisition. It discusses various attempts by human beings to teach animals human languages, focusing most on primates but also including chapters on dolphins and parrots. No doubt, the focus is on primates because that's where most of the research has taken place.

Whereas Stephen Pinker was dismissive of the ability of animals to learn language, Hillix and Rumbaugh are believers. Pinker comes up in this book at least once, in the second to last chapter, where the authors try to answer the objections of the various scholars who disagree with them. I found Pinker's statements to be somewhat misleading, if I am to believe these authors, for Pinker had noted that all researchers had given up on the idea of animals learning languages--including some of those included in this book--save for Rumbaugh himself. In fact, this book, written after Pinker's own, features some of those same linguists, who are still working with animals and still making various claims about those animals' linguistic abilities.

But what are the objections? Animals who have language skills may be exhibiting only behaviors that look like language but that aren't truly language. They might be picking up on subtle gestures when a human is talking and then taking those as commands. They might be learning words but failing to really understand those words other than as a means to receive some kind of reward. They might be able to use words but can't use syntax (the authors seem to go back and forth on whether primates have syntactic abilities), and if syntax seems possible, it might only be that the animal is learning strings of words rather than words alone. And on and on the problems go. After all, we're talking to some other animal. We can't get into this animal's head to know what is actually going on, just as we can't get into someone else's head to know what's going on in it.

So to what extent are even these things that some critics claim are actually going on not in themselves language? What is language? Is it not simply communication? And so, if we manage to communicate to another creature to pick up a Frisbee, are we not using language that the creature recognizes? Does a bee dance constitute language, since it communicates with other bees?

Or does language have to be something that we can use in unique ways (placing, for example, the word honey into a context not heard before and having the other creature understand, like--"touch the honey with your toe")? Does it have to qualify as more than just requests? What language is is the subject of the second chapter of the book, and it is something that the authors fail to satisfactorily answer, and that is because there is no satisfactory answer.

After that, we're introduced to the various animals and their trainers. We learn of chimpanzees and bonobos and orangutans and apes that have all been trained to use language. Some animals master close to two hundreds words, we're told; some have possibly used at one time or another up to one thousand words. Tests are recounted, including some that are supposed to guard against things like the Clever Hans effect (where a gesture acts as a command to a linguistic cue). Some are meant to test just what the creature is understanding: Can the creature separate like items from unlike items? Can the creature make a new sentence?

The authors also explore how the various creatures learn to talk. Some are taught sign language, some use plastic symbols, some use "lexigrams" (computer based images). Some are talked to with verbal language; some are only talked to in the nonverbal language chosen. But why not just use a verbal language? Some have tried, but apparently primates don't like to use their voice or may not be capable of uttering real words with the voice. One primate, for example, eventually did learn to say verbally Mama, Papa, and Cup, but never anything more. Another possibility is that voice in a monkey is too tied to emotion to be used for language (there are essentially six vocal uses among certain primates).

Techniques used vary. They include tutoring with operant-response procedures (I require you to say "I want a cookie" and reward you accordingly when you do--but this technique, as one might guess, tends to have limited value for getting a creature to use language spontaneously). They also include a more interesting (and recent) technique, wherein language is demonstrated to an animal. Two subjects talk with one another, requesting items and receiving them, in the presence of the primate, who is given the option of joining in the conversation but not directly. In this way, the primate sees how language works.

The interesting thing about this system is that it sort of mirrors the way in which one of the most successful cases of a primate learning language--the case of Kanzi. Kanzi's mother was taught to use lexigrams, but she barely got to fifty words and seemed to have little interest. But Kanzi, the child, who was present at each of these sessions picked up on these things, and when finally separated from the mom as an adult, rapidly progressed to more complex linguistic skills. Some of the creatures among this group have even begun using language with their own children, and one scientist thinks that the creatures are creating a kind of creole of English and monkey speak.

I was, coming into the text, most interested in dolphins, seals, and parrots, since I was least familiar with these language experiments. I found myself, however, less interested in these chapters than I thought I would be when I got to them. The fact that these creatures are so far away from humans anatomically means that language training with them is in some ways less interesting--one is forced to used odd systems in the case of dolphins, since there's really no means to "talk" otherwise. And the parrot, while perhaps having mastered some words in the human tongue, seems focused, at least in the discussions on the text, on requests (gimme a grape . . .), which in turn doesn't lend to much thinking on the readers part about the nature of the mind of the creature.

The discourse with primates, however, can be interesting to learn about. Unfortunately, discussions are fairly rudimentary, as one might expect. Still, there seem to be indications that conversations sometimes go beyond expressing needs and desires. And more than that, though, the techniques used with primates have been adopted for use with language-handicapped children, such that some of these children have then been able to begin speaking, although not necessarily with their mouths. Just how much animals know, to what extent they think like humans--these are fascinating questions to explore, and because we are locked into the bodies in which we have, they are questions that are not easily answered. Helix and Rumbaugh and the researchers they discuss take a stab at it.

On "Hunger of Memory" by Richard Rodriguez ****

I've known about this book for years. I haven't heard much about it since I moved to the South, but back when I was an undergraduate in California, this text was mentioned frequently in various lectures. And Rodriguez's book Days of Obligation (or something like that) came out during those college years as well and was something of a popular seller. Whether it's that I live in the comparatively Hispanic-poor South (although Hispanics are now fast gaining ground in terms of percentage of population in the area) or that I've been out of school and thus out of the earshot of folks referencing Rodriguez, I haven't heard much about him or his writing since leaving California.

Rodriguez's book is on my language reading list chiefly because it is, in part, a book about learning language--learning a second language, as a child (it is the second of two autobiographies about language education on the list). Language is the subject of the first couple of chapters of the text, and it's interesting what Rodriguez has to say about it, given that he is one of those kids who assimilates by learning the language of his host country, while his parents don't quite. Sure, his parents speak English, but it is accented and stilted; Rodriguez and his siblings, by contrast, learn to speak the English that native-born Americans speak. But it was not always that way. Rodriguez, before going to school, chiefly spoke Spanish--because that is what his parents and the family spoke in the home. This meant trouble, however, in school, where Rodriguez struggled to communicate in English. To ensure that their kids did better in school, his parents began to speak English in the home.

For Rodriguez, this was a pivotal moment. Before, Spanish was his language--and his life. Spanish, for him, is the language of family, of private concerns. English, by contrast, is a language for the public. So moving to English meant moving into the public sphere, moving into the world. And it also meant splitting, in a way, from his family. This is the hunger--a desire for the nostalgic past, the private past, the private language, he once had (he is no longer, he claims, a good Spanish speaker).

But contrary to what one might expect, he embraces this hunger. It is natural. It is what comes with becoming an American, with moving into the public sphere, with becoming educated. It is the price one pays for opportunity and for assimilation.

Other chapters focus on Rodriguez's Catholic upbringing (the chapter I enjoyed most, I think), as he moved from Catholic schools to non-Catholic universities; on Rodriguez's skin color (his desires as a young person to be more white); and his relationship with affirmative action and the academy.

Regarding skin color, I thought a bit in relation to my own very white skin. Rodriguez hated to undress, when younger, lest he get too dark a tan; I have never liked to undress because of a lack of a tan (and no desire to spend hours trying to obtain one). For Rodriguez, dark meant poor--like Mexican day laborers; what does light mean to me? Unadventurous?

On affirmative action, Rodriguez's comments remind me a bit of an episode of What's Happening? when the waitress Shirley gets a job in an office--as the token black. She quits when she finds this out. Rodriguez admits that he's done well by the system but that he is uncomfortable with it. For him, the problem is that he does not consider himself disadvantaged. It is the poor who are disadvantaged, no matter the color of the skin; to promote people who are already comfortably off based on skin tone seems to him unfair--not just to whites (who often bemoan affirmative action, but mostly for reason pertaining only to their own selfish ends) but most importantly to those who most need it, the people at the bottom of the ladder economically. He has a good point, though given that, then really our focus as a society would have to be not on jobs or higher learning but on the very start of learning, the early years, on ensuring less-advantaged children have a chance.

Rodriguez ends with a chapter on writing, on how writing is a public act in which one reveals secrets. The private, intimate language of home can be put into the public sphere via writing--though in the process, it becomes not private at all but some kind of public rendition of it. I was left to think about his ideas of private family talk, given that they seem so tied up in this Spanish/English divide. My mom grew up speaking German, but like Rodriguez, switched over to English in school; now, she knows no German. This is at it should be, she says--as Rodriguez says, kids must put on the public language. I've tended to think that bilingual education is useful to those who have it, that it is not the danger some make it out to be.

As an English only speaker, I guess I don't quite know what Rodriguez is driving at with these languages used for different purposes. I too have a private language, but it is not based on which national tongue I speak. It is based on who I am talking with (I do not speak the same to everyone). And like Rodriguez, writing is a strange thing, where I put out in public sometimes things I would never say in public or in private, except in the privacy of my own head. Why writing makes certain people feel this way, I don't know.

On "The Story of My Life" by Helen Keller ***

Helen Keller has becomes part of the national mythos. I've known vaguely, since I was a kid, that she a blind and deaf child who managed somehow to overcome her circumstances to get an education and to be of aid to other handicapped people. I knew Anne Sullivan was her teacher. And that was probably about it.

The focus on language as instinct got me to think about Keller and to various ideas that linguists are exchanging regarding language acquisition. Here, after all, was someone who had not learned language as a baby and yet still mastered it, who had not had a chance to babble--with hands or with tongue, to hear or to see language, and yet who still managed to learn.

But in the end, she does not discount the theories of Pinker or Chomsky, for Keller, as this early autobiography makes clear, had both sight and sound for the first eighteen months of her life. Hence, the instinctualists could claim that those early months were what allowed her access to our language-based world. Keller claims, for instance, that before she had lost sight and sound, she had learned the word for water. She called it "wa-wa." It is how she remembers that word sounding. And she claims to remember certain sights too (this goes against someone else's insights, wherein the author claimed that with the loss of sight, one's memories of it began to fade too).

"Wa-wa" proves to have crucial importance in the book (as it does in various movie adaptations of Keller's life), for it is water that Keller first learns to interpret in sign language--a language she has to learn by feeling her teacher's hands. Before this, apparently, there is some vague usage of signs for specific things, but by an large, Keller is cut off from language as a child, and her frustration with her situation is evident in the various tantrums she throws. How one could bear to live without either sound or sight is beyond me, especially if there is no means to communicate with the world outside one's self. It seems an utterly solitary life, like being buried alive. How Keller finally makes the intellectual leap to understand that signs have meaning and that each item has a name is beyond me. But she does it. It all seems very reasoned out in her autobiography.

A more difficult word for Keller is "doll," for it takes her teacher a bit more skill to convey to her that "doll" is not a specific doll but anything of this particular category that Keller is holding. "Love" proves to be difficult as well, for it demands the Keller begin to grasp that some words refer to things that are abstract rather than concrete. But each symbol is grasped in time. In total, given the reasoned explanations she gives for each step along the way of her learning, she seems one closer to confirming Geoffrey Sampson's claims regarding language than Pinker's.

And really, that is one of the amazing things about Keller's story, for she makes the leap to language not only in terms of learning to feel signs and to read braille but to read lips (with her fingers) and to speak with her own tongue, all of this through much effort rather than some innate ability. Nothing seems beyond this woman. She recounts her difficulties with math in school. Math? I can't imagine trying to do complex algebra in my head, for that seems the only way one could do it without the help of one's eyes.

Another amazing thing is Keller's attitude, which remains so almost completely positive throughout her educational ordeal. She's just happy to talk and to listen and to read. The last half of this book--after she finishes discussing her move into language and her education--is mostly about the books she likes and about the people she's met.

Finally, there is the way that Keller tells her story that is rather fascinating. One realizes just how much our vocabulary depends on verbs revolving around our sense of sight. There is much here in this text about touch and smell--the feel of the waves at a beach, the acidic essence of the air before a thunderstorm, the rattle of the ground near thunder--but Keller often will comment on particular elements she's experienced being the most wonderful thing she's seen, as if she's seen any of it. Moonlight and sunshine--both of these are words that call to our attention chiefly what passes before our eyes--but for Keller they are just as real, even if they are just a feeling on the skin. The book can be read or downloaded here, and the audio version here.

On "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent *****

This is by far the most entertaining book I've ever read about language. Okrent's subject is artificial languages, and in delving into the subject of invented tongues, Okrent reveals a lot about what language actually does--and why artificial languages rarely move beyond theory to actual practice.

Invented tongues have been around for a long while, but Okrent's story really gets started in the late 1600s, during the Age of Reason, with a man named John Wilkins. Many philosophers at the time thought that a language based in philosophy would be a benefit to mankind. Wilkins, something of a scientific aid (he worked with many top scientists in his day through scientific communities) set out to create just such a language. Meanwhile, another man set out to do the same thing. The other man created a language that for "ease of use" was based on a long epic poem, with various vocabulary words pointing to various lines in the poem. Wilkins thought it more important to place terms in a kind of tree form, categorizing each type of thing and creating a word based on that. Okrent sets out to find Wilkins's four-letter word for excrement and finds the search rather difficult, for the term isn't under body or bodily functions but under motion (related to things like vomiting). As a language Wilkins's effort proved less than fruitful, but as it turns out, his categorization scheme became essentially the base for today's modern thesauruses.

Next, Okrent turns to the more familiar story of Esperanto. While the first chapter focuses on philosophical languages, the second focuses on languages meant to be easy to learn and to unify the world. In fact, many of these languages are created with the hope that they will bring world peace--if we could all just understand one another, after all, there might be less fighting. The proof seems to be otherwise, for in almost every case, the languages break down before they even come to fruition. One faction wants to make a change that another doesn't want to make, and we end up with not one version of Esperanto but two, then three, then four, then thirty-two. It's rather sad, really, to think how even in this, we humans can't get along.

Nevertheless, Esperanto--the original--did manage to garner enough of a following that there are actually speakers of the language. They meet at a conference each year, and Okrent's description of the conference is fascinating, as is her description of the language (for example, of how Esperanto can say some things we simply can't say in English, such as "the sky is bluing"). Also fascinating was the story of an Esperanto rock star--a native Esperanto speaker (his parents met through the language and then spoke it in the home, raising their children to learn it as their first language). Okrent's enthusiasm for the tongue almost makes me want to go out and learn it.

Next, Okrent moves to symbol languages, as inspired by Chinese (or a misunderstanding of it). Chinese characters, Okrent notes, were once based on sounds (morphemes), though in some cases their usage has strayed far. Charles Bliss, who was fascinated by how the same symbol could be used in any language for a word, set out to create a new system of writing, with symbols that would be easier to interpret. His system would eventually be adopted by some schools for the disabled (for kids who can't talk or write), and it would do wonders for those children, allowing them, for the first time, access to express themselves. But Bliss, as Okrent shows, was a fascinating man not just for his language but for his psychological problems, and his insistence of utter control over how his symbols should be used would put him on a crash course with medical administrators and eventually the law (can one copyright a language?).

Similar issues arise in Okrent's next chapter, on yet another language that tries to apply philosophy--this time, logic--in its creation: Loglan. Instead of categories, this language sets up each phrase as a mathematical formula that people then insert the appropriate function into. Or something like that. It seemed an utterly difficult language to me. But the initial idea for it was interesting. Its inventor wanted to test Benjamin Whorf's theory regarding how language perhaps limits our way of thinking, by creating a new language and using it in experiments with those who learn it. Unfortunately, its inventor proved to be a control freak too, and as a result, the language group splintered, and various lawsuits resulted.

(But even if a language takes life, and a reasonable number of people begin to speak it, as with Esperanto, the natural processes of language take over. Okrent shows how in Esperanto, the great simplicity manifest in the language is itself simplifying among next-generation speakers, but in the process the language is also becoming irregular [and thus, in another way, more complex] where once it was regular. Hence, the object case endings are disappearing, except in cases where an expression is so well founded that the case ending remains.)

Finally, we come to a chapter on Klingon and other languages invented for film and art. The story of how Klingon came to be is interesting, and it's also interesting to read about how the language is spoken and about the community that speaks it.

Along the way, Okrent also briefly introduces us to other languages, such as a language in which every syllable is one of seven sounds (do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti), such that it can be played on an instrument just as it can be spoken; or a language created for women, in which concepts such as pregnancy take on not just a single word but a set of words for pregnancy at various stages. She also talks briefly of Hebrew, a dead language brought back to life among a group of people without a common tongue. And she does it with great humor and verve. This isn't just a history of language but a history of thought and of art and of human expression.

On "Educating Eve" by Geoffrey Sampson ***

Sampson's book is essentially a refutation of the concept that humans have a "language instinct," as proffered by Steven Pinker (and his predecessor Noam Chomsky). Such "nativist" theories, as opposed to rationalist theories, are particularly dangerous, Sampson believes, on a philosophical level. And in the end that is Sampson's main focus--whether humans are biologically limited machines (drawing on a set of fixed possibilities, even if large) or creative beings able to make an unpredictable something out of nothing, and whether there is a mind as opposed to just a set of chemical reactions in the nerve center we call the brain. Sampson calls into question materialism, which I have no problem with, but I'm not sure how or why a nonmaterialist centers so much discussion on evolution as such, since a belief in dualism would tend to work against a materialist theory such as evolution (after all, did the nonmaterial "mind" evolve, and if so, how?).

Sampson puts up a very clear and formidable argument against the language instinct concept, refuting nearly every major point brought up by Chomsky and Pinker. I am probably slightly more persuaded to Sampson's point of view than the other, though even Sampson admits that on some level, this is the old nature versus nurture debate, and we all know that the answer to that lies somewhere in between. Sampson sides heavily on the nurture side; Pinker and Chomsky on the nature side. Academics can argue and argue, but the true answer probably does lie in between.

To the idea that language acquisition in young children learn language too quickly for it to be anything but instinct, Sampson asks, "Too quickly compared to what?" It takes a child two years--that's a fairly long portion of the human lifespan. Sampson doesn't bring this up, but I was thinking about walking. It is something we "learn," but it's something all children eventually do. Would the fact that it takes two years (as compared to other animals, who walk immediately) put it in the learning camp? Or would the fact that virtually all children eventually DO walk put it in the instinct camp? Were a child to grow up in a society that crawled everywhere crawl rather than walk? In a sense, these are the kinds of questions linguists are arguing over when debating over how natural or acquired language is. And in a sense, the question isn't completely answerable, without doing something horrendous, like taking a bunch of kids and putting them in a place where they couldn't learn to walk or learn a language from adults. What would happen then?

Well, we know in part the answer with regard to language. The case is demonstrated by one "Genie," who grew up severely neglected and who could not learn grammar once she was found, as a teen, by proper society. But Sampson questions even this, claiming that one child cannot a theory prove, especially when Genie came out of a case that was also an emotional trauma as well. Perhaps, there are other reasons she did not talk, he points out. (He doesn't discuss the Indian some centuries back who did exactly what I noted--locked up a bunch of babies so that they couldn't learn language--to see what happened. The anecdote is in either the Pinker or the Davis book.)

That children do learn language more quickly and easily in general does seem to be true to me, but it is also true of most basic things, Sampson says, since as we get older our minds become less sharp. He points to adults who do manage to master second languages--something the nativists say doesn't happen (at least not without significant accents). On this point, one could probably point to examples of both, it does indeed seem that children do better than most adults at acquiring new tongues. Of course, Sampson's reply would be that children are motivated where adults often aren't--a child thrust into a new setting with friends and society around that speaks the new language is going to find more reason to learn the language than an adult who can fall back on the old language, especially in an immigrant community. To arguments that adults can learn physics while children can't, Sampson would point to the need for undergirding knowledge.

The fact that children aren't motivated also points to why they won't learn something like math or physics with the same degree of speed or in a manner that is seemingly automatic.

Some of Sampson's arguments aren't particularly convincing to me. The least convincing of the counterarguments he actually bothers making is one that involves headless nouns. Here, he pulls out Pinker's claim that a headless compound noun will add the plural -s but a nonheadless one will take on the irregular form. We're talking about words like "mailman" here. "Men" is the plural of "man," and when combined with "mailman" becomes "mailmen" in the plural. But a headless noun doesn't follow that rule. Take a word like "tenderfoot," and make it plural. A tenderfoot is not a type of foot--foot is not the head of the compound. "Tenderfoot" is a whole other word, and thus becomes "tenderfoots" in the plural. Sampson argues that he might well say "tenderfeet" (and so on for the various examples); I find this doubtful. Each example Pinker noted seemed like the more common use to me. So Sampson does some research and finds a case where the irregular does sometimes apply to the plural of a headless noun, and to his American example, I can say that he's entirely correct, since I've used it (though I would likely now just use the singular as the plural in conjunction with other words like it). The word is "Blackfoot," as in the Indian tribe. No one says "Blackfoots" for the plural, but some writers do say "Blackfeet." That said, one also refers to several English, several French, several Cherokee or several Cherokees, so the more common usage would seem to me to be "several Blackfoot."

Another argument that proves to be less effective to me is one that Sampson makes in a couple of cases, where he essentially doesn't argue the point at all. He states that since the nativists bother to argue a given point, it proves that the point isn't self-evident, which means that empiricism must be the cause of the particular phenomenon. In other words, if you argue the point, you must be incorrect, because if you were correct, you wouldn't bother to argue it. This seems to me the old witch trial (float and you're a witch and deserve to die; drown and you probably aren't a witch).

I am actually finding myself more persuaded in some ways by Pinker as I review these points. But there is much to find disingenuous in the nativists cause as well. Sampson notes some disturbing things with regard to the research done on the family who couldn't learn grammar that Pinker talks about. The family lacks a grammar gene supposedly--or does it? Sampson points out that the family, if you actually look closely, by and large tests lower than average on IQ tests; grammar isn't the only problem--it's not isolated. (The family members with grammar problems average 85 in IQ; average population is around 100; then again, Sampson doesn't address the anomaly of at least one that supposedly scored 110 among the problem grammar group.)

Pinker does a lot of pulling sentences around to trace elements as we move from a statement to a question, and uses this part of grammar to prove his instinct point. He also talks of sentences not being about to house phrases inside of a phrases. It was a discussion that interested me little, and Sampson's pointing out that these points seem highly artificial--and not even necessarily true--made sense to me.

But Sampson's main concern is that Pinker and Chomsky are, in his mind, arguing from a Platonic point of view wherein there is limited knowledge, all of which is already known, and that all we are doing is "remembering" it. Taken to this extreme, I wouldn't be able to side with the nativists either. But taken to the other extreme, that we can create something from nothing, I don't think I can side with Sampson either.

On "Mother Tongue" by Joel Davis ****

Joel Davis's Mother Tongue covers much the same ground as Pinker's Language Instinct, at least to start, but without as much of a clearly defined or argued thesis. In that sense, I found myself wanting back into Pinker's book; I liked that he had an agenda, that he was about to make a point and prove it. And yet, despite that, Davis, for me, seemed the better, more entertaining writer. Mother Tongue seemed aimed toward a popular audience; The Language Instinct seemed aimed toward a scholarly audience and then somewhat weakly (or superficially) adapted to appeal to a wider range.

Part of what bored me with the early portions of Davis's book was that I'd read so much of this before. He starts by trying to define language, which, while not covered in the previous book, was not the most exciting discussion to me. I understand that he has to establish his terminology, but language--you know, yes, that's right, we know. We know it when we hear it. Or do we? That comes up later, so these early discussions actually come to be of some importance.

Next, we have a history of languages, some of which was interesting, but again much of which was covered in Pinker. Essentially, Davis goes into theories about proto-languages, the supposed languages that might have broken down in our various language families, how, for example, we can trace French to Latin and Latin is probably from a larger family called Indo-European because it shares many traits with Sanskrit, and on and on back. Then comes a discussion of phonemes, of morphemes, of grammar. And so it goes.

But the book really got interesting to me in its second (of three) parts, when Davis delves into the brain. Some of this was covered in Pinker's book, but much of it was not. Davis gets down to detail here, focusing on how exactly the brain works and how language may interact with it. He talks about the scientists doing research in this field and the techniques they use.

Early on (like 150 years ago), one researcher would cut open the skulls of dogs and tear out parts of the brain to see how they'd react. This was essential research to our early understanding, but obviously it wouldn't today. Early twentieth-century researchers and even some today do experiments, by consent, with some who are having brain surgery. Here's the thing: the brain doesn't have nerves that feel pain, so researchers who are in there anyway can probe around, hitting this or that with a little electric stimulation and seeing what happens. You can be awake for this, simply on local anesthesia, since you can't feel it. That means, you can also be asked questions as the work is done. Pretty cool, eh?

Now, add into that sophisticated machinery--CT scans, MRI scans, PET scans--and researchers can check out what parts of the brain are reacting during different events. And that brings us to language. Two particular areas, discovered early in research on the brain, seemed to have much to do with language. The reason these conclusions were reached were that certain patients--World War I vets hit in the back of the head, for example--couldn't speak or couldn't speak certain groups of words. They might lose the ability to create syntax or the ability to say words related to musical instruments. (Other things also can go wrong in the brain--the ability, for example, to recognize faces. You might still be able to recognize a voice but a face means nothing to you--very trippy, I'd say.)

But further research is showing that it isn't just two regions where language is stored. It's really all over, but most especially in the left hemisphere of the brain (only a few oddballs have language more in the right hemisphere, usually because of an early childhood accident). Theory, now, is that rather than the brain moving language laterally from back to front, the brain has all these little sectors in which information is stored. That information is all sent to a single gateway where it is processed and put into form. Davis does a lot of comparisons to computers, and his example here seems to help. If you've ever run disk defragmenter on Windows, you know that information gets piled on to the hard disk wherever there's space. Your computer gathers all that info up to run its various programs. So too does our brain--but at a much quicker speed and with multiple processors (so that more can go on at once).

(I'm reminded a bit about something Pinker had written that I didn't mention--namely, how complex grammar is that attempts to get computers to listen, analyze, and respond to human languages have proven near impossible. One of the interesting things is that computers might be able to learn to understand one person's voice, but each person's voice is so unique that the computer can't manage to understand many different voices. And yet, we somehow learn to be able to separate that stream of phonemes and morphemes coming from peoples lips into actual words.)

And that in turn brings me to the third section of Davis's book, which focuses on babies and on how they acquire language. Davis seems to be in the Pinker school here, with more of a leaning toward an instinct than just learning--though neither, I think, are saying that environment has nothing to do with language acquisition. The key thing is that language acquisition is wired into the brain as something unique to our species.

So children, up to puberty, can learn languages easier than adults. But what Davis also brings out is that babies actually can pick up on differences between phonemes that even adults can't. Before one year of age, a child is pretty open to any phoneme, but as the kid becomes accustomed to the mother tongue, it loses the ability to distinguish between phonemes that aren't used in the particular language. The classic example is how difficult it is for Japanese to pronounce L and R because those two letters are essentially one "in-between" letter in the native tongue. And really, what is the difference between B and V or some of our other phonemes--it can be pretty subtle. Experiments show, however, that though babies can pick up the phonemes more easily, children can still pick them up, in short time, if placed into another language context, while adults have much more difficulty. Moreover, adults exposed to certain phonemes through second languages as adults, even if they no longer speak the language, have an easier time distinguishing those phonemes than those adults who had not be exposed, though a harder time than those who still use the language.

There's also a discussion of consciousness, which Davis claims is unique to humans because language is unique to us. It's not that animals don't have consciousness, but they don't have it at the same level. Without language, there isn't as clear of a distinction between the me and the world out there. Both Davis and Pinker think animal language is dubious. They may communicate, but it's not language as we know it. Davis raises an excellent point about various animal studies into language--in almost all cases, the researcher is beside the animal, more or less pushing the animal to use the language. (Want candy? Ask for it. Say, Yes.) It's not as if the language is really conveying anything the researcher doesn't know--it's not true linguistic communication. That is saved for us humans, with our special brains and childhood development.

On "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker ***

The first of ten or so books I'll be reading about psycholinguistics--the study of language and its relationship to the brain--is a good introduction to the various subissues that arise: where language comes from, how we learn language, why some people have problems with language, to what degree do animals have language, and so on. Pinker, a linguist, approaches the topic mostly with regard to grammar. His point: that the human mind has a language instinct, or to put it in slightly more precise words: that human beings have an underlying impulse toward speaking grammatically. We do this without the help of teachers or of parents. If we exist among other people, then as babies, we are indoctrinated into the world of grammatical language, whether that be nonstandard English or classical French.

I found much of this book immensely interesting. The first two chapters, which are mostly theoretical and lay out Pinker's argument, were the most intriguing. Later chapters also have a lot to offer. Unfortunately, chapters 3 and 4--the chapters where Pinker really lets loose with the sentence diagramming--were a bit much for me. I enjoy diagramming a sentence, but I'm not too inclined to read about it or to see someone else do it, over and over and over. To liven things up, Pinker brings in zany examples from e-mails and tabloid newspaper headlines, which seemed usually, to me, like a gloss. "I know you're bored, so here's some tangential materials that you might find funny to sort of help me make my point." I could have done with shorter chapters.

But this is a quibble. After chapter 4, things picked up again for me, and there were another seven chapters to go. In those early chapters, Pinker lays out one basic point, which was interesting to see explored. He does not believe, as some theorists do, that we are as humans defined by our language. Readers are reminded of the anecdote about an Eskimo tribe with 120 words for snow; Pinker says this is a myth, and points out that English itself has tens of words for frozen precipitation. Just because a word doesn't exist for an item in our language doesn't mean that we can't conceive of it, he says. And further, he notes, we do not think in language. Thoughts are something else. How do we know? Because we can often have a thought but fail to find the right word to express it. Common sense, indeed. (And yet, I know that I think in words in one way because I have conversations with myself inside my head. So perhaps words begin to fill in for thoughts? These are issues for another brain person to write about.)

Later chapters focus on specific subjects. Can primates learn language? Pinker says no, and he says the question is ludicrous anyway, for primates may be from the same evolutionary ancestor but that does not mean that they too would have language. Language, Pinker believes, came about after the human tree split off.

A grammar gene? Pinker sites studies of families wherein grammatical difficulties reside in a high percentage of the people, such that they have problems knowing when to use "are" with a noun (he are; they are--it doesn't make a difference in the family). Likewise, there are idiot savants that can speak completely grammatically but whose every sentence is nonsense (the cows are doing nicely in the bathtub, don't you think? I rather like shiny plastic. But my mother says colors are for babies). He looks into our brains and discusses exactly where language resides. He talks of how grammar is something we develop before the age of nine or so, and of how, failing that--as has happened with some unfortunate neglected and abused children--the ability to state things grammatically is forever lost, as the brain devotes those parts to other tasks.

There are sections in the book on phonemes and morphemes. Pinker draws out the reasons that some of our irregular words actually make linguistic sense, which was interesting to see. He points out that children generally learn how to format words according to the rules of the language without ever learning actual words (so that, given a nonexistent verb, they can easily conjugate it--he wugs, they wug).

He touches on the grammar books that tell us not to split infinitives and how many of these rules are absolute hogwash. He also touches on the possible origins of language.

In the latter element, I am left a bit startled. Pinker is big on natural selection and on evolution and assumes virtually every "educated" reader will be as well. Count me out. As much as he can explain that over time a person with linguistic abilities would outsurvive those who didn't somehow mutate such traits and pass them on, I fail to see how (1) humans would have simultaneously developed organs that could talk (something primates don't have) and the mind that could forge sentences, and (2) what advantage abstract concepts such as "purpose" or "meaning" would offer to evolutionary evolved beings. In the end, we have to part company there, because his science, as I see it, is as much a faith as mine.

The last chapter discusses some of the implications of his basic thesis, the main one of which is very intriguing indeed. If we have a language instinct, Pinker notes, than all humans have a fundamental biological tie to one another. In essence, we are not determined by our culture but by our biology. Of course, this is qualified, for even Pinker understands that such things work hand in hand.