The three phenomena in effect

The author in Chapter 8 (The Tower of Babel) goes on, in three consecutive parts to elaborate on the three major factors (learning, innovation and migration) responsible for the variations of the language throughout the world despite the conviction that there is one innate language all the others drive from. Somehow the author manages to explain the third phenomenon in more irrelevant or unnecessary details than is either fathomable or memorable by the average mind. In my opinion he fails to present more scientific facts to support or elucidate the two others which deserve more attention. Or simply they are more fascinating phenomena than the third one in my mind's eye. I might try to find other sources either from the back of the book or the internet to follow up on them.

The learning trend declares that only some parts of a certain grammar would become innate through the human evolution and the rest remain to be learned by the children born into those languages through interactions with the community and it is even learned within a community itself when some inventions or use of a natural thingamabob requires them to invent a word as well. Another reason for not having the whole codes of language innately placed in our brains is that the language by nature is a sharing code event within people. It according to the author is useless to be possessed by only one person and it will soon "fall out of register with everyone else's". "It would be like a Tango for one", Pinker says.

Anyhow, it still somehow falls short of my clearest comprehension. I need to read more on this one.

The innovation experience is even more intriguing and although more explained than the first one, some details of it still evades my understanding. Perhaps I need to read it or explore it more , too.

To put it simply this event initially happens when some language speaker "starts to speak differently" and then it spreads like a contagious incident. The change in speech can happen for a variety of reasons: a word coined, a borrowed term, a stretch in meaning, new jargon or styles that seemed too cool to let go of and gradually penetrated the "mainstream". Language innovation also happens for a more fascinating reason as the author professes: it can occur when a person's brain "reanalyzes" part of a language he mishears or is vague or incomplete. In doing so, he produces something quite new. This trend can be established in different linguistic context: syntactic, phonological, morphological and so on. (P.243-246)

The third phenomenon relates to the history of languages' origin which is not fully solved or explored and has resulted in controversial theories. It also contains the issue of language families which in turn are not fully discovered. This third factor or the way it was explored by the author did not quite charm me. It was either the long display of unfamiliar linguistic terms or the undeveloped and contentious research on the families of the language and their origin that made me lose interest. However, the alarming notion of some languages' extinction due to our modern ways of life, migration and extinction of some ancient cultures is what to which Pinker succeeds to draw the attention.

What if only one language remains at the end?

Should we intervene in the process of language extinction?

What if the natives of such languages don't want the intervention?

What happens to all that literature and language produced?

There is some hope, Pinker confesses: We could still record it. We could produce instructional material in those languages. This seems inadequate to me, as the author himself in a preceding paragraph declares that only children born to those languages can save them from elimination. With the facts above, we can say that children probably can save the oral part of the language more thoroughly.