I wish I knew how to properly do a summary c.c

The book I am reading, The Language Instinct How the Mind Creates Language, is more like the title than I thought it would be. This book actually goes into the detail of how our minds are like little machines creating and formulating our language and since I've started reading this book, I give my mind a lot more credit. First the author, Steven pinker, debunks the origins of language. It is not just a cultural instinct, but it manifests itself out of a special human instinct. He also states that these languages, no matter from what culture they originate or which seems to be more advanced, all these languages are equal in sophistication. This also branches over to those who are thought to have poor education or are working-class, speak a courser or simpler language. However, these underestimated people, have a dialect all their own that is just as complicated as standard English. For example, black English vernacular, has just as many grammatical rules for sentence structure as English, and the words and sentences constructed are just as correct as English. Next he discusses how language is formed, that children actually reinvent language generation after generation all on their own, with no help from how their parents speak to them, "Look at the doggy! See the pretty doggy? Look at the doooooooooooooogggyyyy.", otherwise known as "motherese". The key example given is how children who have parents that speak a sort of broken language, a language that is not their mother tongue and that they have learned through attempting to pick up words around them, those children develop a much more refined and grammatical version called creole. These children obviously did not learn it from their parents, so the deduction is that there is an innate grammatical machine in the brain that takes I what the child has learned from the parent and creates a new more advanced form. Children are wired with a logic of language that helps to create more grammatical and clearer sentences, sentences the child could never have learned from motherese, but from that child's own mind. The theory that language comes from IQ is also being questioned as people with a certain disease, Williams syndrome, where their IQ is less than 50, yet they have amazing language skills, even better than most people of average IQ, because these individuals speak very artfully with very advanced vocabulary. With this information, it can be deduced that IQ and language abilities are separate entities and that there very well could be a part of the brain, that Williams syndrome does not effect, that preserves this ability for language but takes away the ability to even do basic functions. In terms of how language effects the individual, it has been said that certain cultures effect the kind of language they speak and therefore effect the people and their thought patterns, however, this is not true. The key argument for this was that old fable that eskimos have over 100 words for snow and it is so easy to believe since they live in such snowy places. However, this has actually been debunked and eskimos have no more words for varieties of snow than us English language speakers do. Also, people have believed that individuals thoughts are effected by their language. Like italian speakers are more sexist because their language is genderized, however, this has also been disproven. There is a language, in which no mention of what time the event occurred was mentioned, so it was assumed those people had no concept of the future or past, however, once they were tested they were shown to have a full understand of past present and future. What I found most interesting was that thought is what influences language. Without thought to digest and manipulate what is said to us, to give context, we would have a very difficult time really understanding what anybody says to us. Like in terms of ambiguous news lines like "Iraqi head seeks arms", without having our thoughts to digest what is being said this sentence could be very confusing. Also that language is not always explicit, one must fill in the blanks in order to understand what is being said like "John is an elephant. Elephants live in Africa. Elephants have tusks.", without the use of our critical thinking, we would not be able to string together this sentence in a way that will be able to fully describe John. Finally, there is a discussion about how a computer could easily be an advanced speaker by just giving charts of words that generally follow each other or could go with each other, therefore making us no better than the computer, but we are better than the computer. We can make sentences that are more than just a string of words, words that would normally have no probability to be together in a sentence, can still be grammatical in English. Also, the computer only understands a certain number of possible sentence structures and can not keep track of what already was said in the sentence, so it avoids the possiblities of any discrepancies by not making those sentences at all. The human mind is much more advanced than the computer and unlike the computer it is utterly limitless.

My research book

To be frank, when we were told we had to do a research paper I was mortified. In the first week of classes I was already being bombarded by all my other proffesors over tests and quizzes that were coming up very soon. My first instinct, though childish, was to choose the shortest book I could find, so I would not have to stress about finishing it so much, since I tend to take my time with reading. I thought this way i'd be able to handle all my classes with ease and maybe even have time to read the book that I actually want to finish, Infinite Jest, which has been gathering dust in my house since school started. However, looking through the books I realized what an opportunity this research paper really was. I began to think of this research paper as a means to really further understand language, more so than what an oversimplified textbook and condensed course could teach me. I figured I needed to find the book that would coincide with what we learned in class, as well as enhance other areas of the subject. First I considered that baby book everybody else in the class and their mother have chosen so far, the scientist in the crib, it had many good reviews and the overall consensus of those reviews was that it was a fun read. However, I felt that just learning how babies learn language or anything related to that was not enough. Even though, as a psychology major who wants to go into education psychology, I will probably have to learn a lot about that topic, I wanted to find a book that also contained information on how babies learned language, but more so about language in general, a sort of language reference book. I found exactly what I was looking for in The Language Instinct How the Mind Creates Language, by Steven pinker. This book excited me because it was about language described almost like a journey through all aspects of language. This book is like a scavenger hunt to find the true origins of language whether it is from some genetic making when we are born or if we just acquire it from our environment. This book not only discusses how babies talk but also how people make sense of what their talking about. This book even further dives into neuroscience, going into all the language centers of the brain and genes that might be responsible for controlling grammar and speech. I am excited for what I will learn through this book and what I will learn from the rest of you.

Autobiographical Reflection

Ever since I was a child, I hated that I spoke English. I felt that English was the white bread of the world whereas people who spoke different languages were far more interesting, more like a whole grain made with a mish mosh of just about everything, like sunflowers seeds, flaxseeds and even honey. But no, I was stuck being born into a boring chemically processed and nutrient lacking language, I, like how I thought of English, was boring and dull. Though my father knew Italian and many other languages, he never spoke it unless asked to or it was required. My mother was never taught her native Serbian language, though she still claims she is French and speaks French, yet can only speak a few words. I was sent to a Jewish school starting from kindergarten until 10^th grade, since my mom was Jewish and wanted me to learn the culture. In this school they gave us a bilingual education of the language native to Jews, Hebrew, as well as English. Most of the children I attended school with had Barents that spoke Hebrew at home, or at least knew it pretty well. This is partly what set off the isolation I felt in school for many years, since my Barents never knew Hebrew and every Hebrew class was completely foreign to me, though it was just as simple as English to my classmates. I never tried very hard towards my Hebrew studied because since I felt so different from everyone that knew how to speak Hebrew, I would never be able to learn it like them. This led to me not trying hard in school at all, but teachers never reprimanded me r gave me the bad grades I know now I probably deserved. I even got special tutoring for my English classes, even though if I even paid the slightest attention to what the teacher was saying or even looked at my homework, I would have never been given the tutors. Though their extra attention probably gave me an edge at my English, since in 10^th grade, I had a teacher tell me, for the first time ever, that I in fact wrote extraordinarily well, in his English Literature class, and that I was not at all boring for how I used English. He also said that my English was, in fact, overflowing with color and personality. It was with his encouragement that I finally felt that thought I still felt different from the other students, that maybe being different, was my edge over everyone else that just tried to blend into the woodwork. With this newfound confidence, I tried hard in all my classes and got A’s for the first time in my life. I feel that my own brand of English speaking and of writing it, just like Deutscher said in his article “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”, has shaped me as a person for my focus on the more eclectic words in the dictionary, often reflect who I am in the sense that, in life, I am always searching for and am appreciative of all that is different, unique and even little weird, just like me.