The Language Game
How improvisation created language and changed the world
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The Language Game
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Narrated by:
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Peter Noble
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
What is language? Why do we have it? Where does it come from? Why does that matter?
Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways.
Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains:
· How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech.
· Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers.
· Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied---and why no two people speak quite the same language.
· Why humans have language, but chimps don't.
· How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution
· How language doesn't limit, but does shape, how we think.
·And ultimately, why what we have come to understand about how language works, gives us greater hope for our future.
'Highly original and convincing ... a delight to read!' - Daniel Everett
© Morten H.Christiansen, Nick Chater 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
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Critic reviews
The Language Game is a highly original, convincing story of how humans developed their greatest invention, language. A delight to read, it deserves careful study by anyone interested in the nature, function, and origins of human communication.
(Daniel Everett, author of Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes and How Language Began)