The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well. Christine Kenneally
About This Quote

Language is not an instrument evolved by the brain. The brain does not work like a language, which is why it can be so challenging to learn how to speak properly.

Source: The First Word: The Search For The Origins Of Language

Some Similar Quotes
  1. I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother. - Martha Gellhorn
  2. Self-talk reflects your innermost feelings. - Asa Don Brown
  3. Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. - C.g. Jung
  4. How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole - C.g. Jung
  5. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. - C.g. Jung
More Quotes By Christine Kenneally
  1. [I]t is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and is integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won't gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms...
  2. At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.
  3. But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose.
  4. The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and...
  5. The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.
Related Topics