The Human Language Series

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," said linguist Noam Chomsky...and people listened...and that was the point. While making no literal sense, the sentence makes perfectly good syntactical sense, and therefore the brain tries to wrap itself around the sentence and extract meaning. Chomsky, who fired the definitive shot in the imitation vs. innateness debate (i.e., are the structures for learning language inherent in our genetic make-up or do we simply mimic what we hear?), conclusively proved that humans must be pre-wired for language. How and why are a couple of the questions explored in this fascinating series which travels the globe to look at people speaking English, Xhosa, and Eskimo, and asks what these languages have in common. The opening tape, Discovering the Human Language, explores the universal grammar which seems to underlie all human language; the second volume, Acquiring the Human Language, examines the phenomenon of how our children swiftly adopt complex grammatical structures at a very young age; and the final tape, The Human Language Evolves, asks how and why did language evolve in the first place (must have been important, since our larynxes dropped to accommodate it--the trade-off being that now we can choke on our food). The roll call of interviewees is impressive: Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould, Deborah Tannen, Suzette Haden Elgin, and many more. Although the price puts this out of the reach of most public libraries, this is highly recommended for colleges and universities and others who can afford it. (R. Pitman)