Book Reviews, Learning New Languages Through the Internet

It looks like the jury's starting to come back on Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought and things look pretty favorable for our East-coast counter-theorist. Pinker examines language, 'facts' and truths in 'The Stuff of Thought' portrays the new book as insightful, and packed with interesting information. Mind your language, professor also hails it in largely glorifying terms, though admits that "the Harvard professor demonstrates a frustrating reluctance to go from A to B if there's any chance of a detour to Z." I'm busily listening to the book myself in my free time (audio CDs if anybody wants to borrow them...), and can definitely attest to this latter point. It truly is a very interesting, enlightening book, but is also very complicated and is sometimes hard to follow (especially if you're listening to fragments while riding between classes). The youtube lecture he gives at Google is probably the most accessible summary of his points available, the most entertaining of which is his section on swearing. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to discuss language innateness so much in this book, considering he already wrote The Language Instinct to cover that topic, but one might say he's making huge strides in further definition and expansion of concepts of universal grammar, or something similar. This something similar might be further from the system of limited innate systems across humanity that Chomsky's "universal grammar" would imply, and closer to the topic of our class, which is how language shapes thought. Pinker would probably turn that around and use his discussions to make the case that thought shapes language, that thought is the broader category and that language is just one window into the far vaster complexities of thought.

One small category I wanted to comment on comes from this short, nonacademic blog entry: Language and violence. In it the author claims that violent crime has increased because of a lack of verbal outlet for frustration. He says that because words like "fuck" are so overused, they've lost their power so people resort to violence to express their anger. Beyond being unsubstantiated, short, and without citation, this article errs in that language is so plastic that it would fill any linguistic gap that appeared. If people wanted or needed words for their anger, they would (and sometimes do) invent them.

Finally, I was very interested by these two sites: Livemocha: A Social Language Learning Experience
and Learn a language without shelling out for a class
I wasn't formerly aware of sites like these. The first aims to connect people who speak different languages for quasi-tutoring sessions online, and the second links to a BBC website that offers free language lessons in a variety of different languages. These free language-learning-based websites are yet more great online resources and places I could spend hours of time if only I had them. But more than that, they offer the benefits of learning a language to those who might not otherwise get it. If a migrant worker wants to learn English and can spend half an hour at the library in the internet on his way home, these sorts of websites could open a lot of doors to him.