Words and Rules Dialogue 1 – D50

For this first true dialogue on Words and Rules, only ten of us were there on time. The ones on the outer circle were Isa, Marce, Alejo, JavierT, Lucía, and Gaby. Only Isa and most of the time Marce and Alejo, were doing a good role being on the outer circle. The other ones were on their phones and not paying attention at all.

The dialogue was good, very organized, and following the rubric. We talked about the main topic of the book, its meta-question you may say. We concluded that by viewing on the preface, “This book tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable. That phenomenon is regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student.” I see this as the main topic is the nature of language, which can be transmitted through words and rules, and exemplified with regular and irregular verbs. As we talked more about the book, we discussed a mixture of the first three chapters although our focus was on chapter one. These questions popped during the dialogue, What is language? Is language inherent to humans or is it something we learn or imitate? Is language an spontaneous order? Well, my thoughts are that language is inherent to humans, because we will always find a way to communicate, whether spoken or written, but we will. Now, spoken language, grammar, words, and rules are products of an evolutionary process of spontaneous order. Babies do not imitate older people, well not in the long term, since they find the rules that govern their particular language. So, yes language is getting more interesting, who would’ve said?