At the end of his book "For Who the Bell Tolls", David Marsh recommends some further reading. The books he recommends include Bill Bryson's "Mother Tongue", which I have read more than once, but his top recommendation goes to "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.
As he writes, "If you only read one book about language, apart from For Who The Bell Tolls, make it this one. Starting from Darwin's assertion that language is 'an instinctive tendency to acquire an art', Pinker, a cognitive scientist, develops the theme that 'people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs'."
And he quotes from the book: "To a scientist, the fundamental fact of language is its sheer improbability. Most objects in the universe - lakes, rocks, trees, worms, cows, cars - cannot talk --- I can arrange a combination of words that explain how octupuses make love or how to remove cherry stains; rearrange the words in even the most minor way, and the result is a sentence with a different meaning or, most likely of all, word salad. How are we to account for this miracle?"
My friends at www.archive.org offered several copies of the book for online reading but had to remove them for copyright reasons. Luckily, YouTube offers the above audiobook. It may not cover the whole 500-page-long book but should whet your appetite to order it on ebay. While you make your decision, you may want to listen to the man himself:
He's written so many fascinating books - click here - that I may well be tempted to press the BUY button more than once. However, right now we're off to the 34°C warm-water pool to chill out those old bones.
