LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  Me acabo de enterar, de refilón, de que me he perdido el XI Congreso Internacional sobre Educación Bilingüe, celebrado en la Universidad de Córdoba. Hoy, 23 de abril, termina. Y yo en babia, como siempre. Pero me percato de que han invitado a Steven Pinker como ponente de relumbrón y a través de él me entero de esta reunión. Interesado en estos asuntos del bilingüismo y habiendo publicado libros y artículos sobre el tema, me entristece no haber podido asistir, por cuenta propia, como oyente por lo menos. Nadie me ha comunicado o mencionado el evento. Sí han invitado al Dr. Pinker, como lingüista y experto, a pesar de que sólo habla y escribe inglés. Su posible bilingüismo, o trilingüismo, se quedó en agua de borrajas, aunque nació en Quebec.

  My brain is normal, like everybody else´s, with a touch of oligophrenia, I am sure of it. I have, thus, the same drawbacks others have, and I hold that my issues are the same issues other brains have. I have a problem with attention and when I am working on some issue my brain takes side trips and explores other questions that concern me. In my college days, class periods were 50 minutes long, supposedly giving us time to run to other classes and buildings. But I learnt that the real reason was that it was supposed then that the attention span of the average student was limited to 50 minutes. Now it seems that the attention span of students is much shorter than that. In my opinion, it is about 10 minutes. After ten minutes, the mind goes away and takes astral trips, like Lobsang Rampa . But the brain can train itself and its plasticity can be used to our advantage. In fact, I have trained my brain to stop itself when it wanders. I have trained it to stop any language to interfere...

  “The primary – indeed the first – and most abiding precept for all writing is clarity, to be clear, understood and intelligible.” Steven Pinker. Something needs to be fixed when we have to go back and reread a sentence because it is unclear to us. The writer should do his job well so as not to force the reader to go back, again and again, to understand what he has written. I think that is bad manners on the part of the author.  

I have read Steven Pinker , Antonio Damasio , Irvin Yalom , Daniel Dennett , and some others interested in the brain and how it works. They all put forward interesting and very illuminating theories that give us a lot of food for thought. My favorite is Santiago Ramón y Cajal who said that each of us can be the architect of our own brains. He meant that there is plasticity in the brain and that as we acquire knowledge new neurons and new pathways among them are formed. This is very evident in the acquisition of a new language when we force the brain to rewire itself. The brain is far from being an open book, even to neuroscientists, but it is clear that if we lose so many cells per day, new ones can be formed and activated daily also, by learning new ways to express ourselves, especially by learning more language. Believing in the plasticity of the brain, in the possibility of rewiring it may be farfetched and optimistic, but we have little to lose trying, trying to augment the horizo...

The word "scientist," like the word "engineer," has depreciated a lot, like currencies in third-world countries.  "Cognitive scientists," "Neuro scientists," "Social scientists" and more. Most of these new scientists deal with conjectures, theories, speculation, guesses... but they protect themselves. Two examples: Steven Pinker, Harvard University,  says, in his "How the Mind Works", at the very start of the book: "... we don´t know how the mind works..."  and then he proceeds to write 660 pages. Suck on that!  Paul Bloom , from MIT, tenders, in the final chapter of his "How Children Learn the Meaning of Words," a revealing confession: "Nobody knows how children learn the meaning of words." Do not forget to add a caveat like the two above, when writing a "scientific" paper, just in case.  

En mi ESCRIBIR Y COMUNICAR EN INGLÉS (Anaya/Oberón, 2016) reseño esta pequeña anécdota: “Le pedí al famoso neurocientífico Steven Pinker de la Universidad de Harvard (autor de A Sense of Style y How the Mind Works ) que me escribiese un prefacio para este libro. Su respuesta es un excelente ejemplo de escritura breve: “Good luck with it, Delfin, but unfortunately I will not be able to write a foreword. Sincerely, Steve Pinker.” No hay más que decir. Emplea las palabras justas, y hasta es cordial al mencionar mi nombre dentro del texto. “ “The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity.” Ernest Hemingway