Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Pinker v. Chomsky/reply (2)

I loved this article, by the way. But it puts me in a strange position of showing both my ignorance and my knowledges at the same time. Which is always akward for me. Things that are said sometimes just go against "how i have understood my world" in such a way, but i've not got the legitimate education or scientific literary references to really be able to argue with any legitimacy.

But here's the thing. When I first encountered chomsky's internal grammar, i was fine with it. It made sense in the languages I knew, it added significantly to my understanding of how children acquire language. But, as i got more into ASL as a language (and not just the pidgin I knew) and as i talk to "visual thinkers" like yourself, it no longer fits, cause of the serious distinction between the way the languages work. But then I say to myself, there are hundreds of deaf people who are in the field of linguistics. surely, if what i felt was right, one of them must have said something like "what about us?"

Ok, that minor problem aside, if you take as true, Universal Grammar, then of teh two I am more likely to turn to Chomsky that "language is a side effect of other things", if I get his evo points correctly. They are quite subtle. Our minds are predisposed to see / use language the way we do, because we have those features in our heads.

BUT this third author who I've not yet read (so much to read), really stricks me as compelling. Symbols, not language itself is teh first critical place. That makes sense in a signed world, by the way, more so than a spoken world. Signed languages have been described as the visualization of ideas, and are not so dependent on the ritualized grammars found in spoken laguages. But if symbols are the first thing we create as human or as our ancestors, then the need to put those into a form that can convey more and more critical ideas is far more compelling. But i've never even heard of him, so.. i need to read what he's really saying.