An eminent neuroscientist who studies language and the human mind says languages are dying around the world. Languages dying off quickly,
says expert who will talk at UHBy Helen Altonn
haltonn@starbulletin.com"Actually, it is worse than the die-off of biological species," says Steven Pinker, who will give a public lecture tomorrow at the University of Hawaii on his latest book, "Words and Rules."
It is estimated that 50 percent to 90 percent of the 6,000 spoken languages now on Earth will be gone in a hundred years, he says.
Pinker, with the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, will be the guest speaker in the UH-Manoa's Distinguished Lecture Series at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow in the Campus Center Ballroom.
He will lead a seminar on "How the Mind Works," the title of one of his books, at 3 p.m. Friday in the Agricultural Science Building, Room 219.
The free public events are co-sponsored by the UH Department of Psychology and the Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology Graduate program.
Pinker, in a telephone interview, said linguists are upset about the disappearance of languages as people join larger societies. "It's not clear exactly what to do about it," he said. "It's a big imperative for linguists to document" the languages.
The Societe de Linguistique de Paris banned the topic of language evolution from discussion in 1866.
Pinker has been one of few researchers to apply modern scientific techniques to restore the study.
He has written many articles and five books, with another due in the fall, about the integration of human evolutionary biology with linguistics.
He says language is a product of the mind, which is a product of the brain, which is a product of evolution.
"It is the same as a biologist looks at any organ from an evolutionary perspective," he said. "What is it supposed to do? What is it designed for?"
Pinker studies how language is acquired and changes over time, how it works and the logic behind it.
In "The Language Instinct," a book published in 1994, he explains that our species has language for the same reason birds have bird songs and spiders have webs.
"Language is part of our biological birthright. It evolved as a system of the human brain," he said.
A generation without language will invent one, he said.
In "Words and Rules," he explains language with a detailed look at one phenomenon: irregular verbs.
Children don't just memorize things but figure out rules unconsciously and logically, he said.
For example, he said, hearing "walk" and "walked," or "talk" and "talked," for example, they say "heard" and "hearded" or "sing" and "singed."
He said he's studied about 20,000 such errors in kids' speech.
"Creatively, they are putting things together," he said.
Although Americans lag behind people of many countries who speak several languages, Pinker said, "We may have the last laugh."
"English is taking over in many fields -- business, science and computers -- at least for the time being," he said.
Unless people speaking different languages make a concerted effort to keep them alive, he said, "they are endangered."