The Spontaneous Origins of Language
Excerpt:
For more than a half-century, the language sciences have proceeded from the theory that order came first. Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguistics, proposed in the 1980s that each child is born with a genetic blueprint (a “universal grammar”) that captures deep patterns common to all languages. Similarly, the psycholinguist Steven Pinker writes of an inborn “language instinct” that captures the rules of language.
An alternative possibility is gaining ground, however—one that holds that language starts from disorderly, ad hoc, communicative signals. Order—in the form of regular verb endings, grammar rules and much more—emerges slowly, spontaneously and always incompletely, over countless interactions and across many generations.
Source: Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-spontaneous-origins-of-language-11645851660
ew: Could the solution not be a matter of both--and?
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It appears that the authors are not carefully distinguishing the issue of how language originated from how language works synchronously. When you look at language synchronously, order is the general pattern, exceptions are less common. When you study how languages change over the centuries, change brings about exceptions, and then new changes often re-introduce regularity. However, the manner in which language works is separate from the issue of language origins. No study has yet to show how human language came to be, and scientific proposals are speculative. But the Scriptures are clear in that we were made in the image of God. I believe language remains the strongest evidence of our uniqueness and the most challenging phenomenon for science to explain.