I never was able to complete her Gilead novel. Hopefully this one will be different

I can see mentioned the name of Steven Pinker. This darwinian psychologist tried to explain how human mind process verbs. In his curious speculations he focused on English verb system and concluded that irregular verbs are kept apart in human brains and regular are just modified by suffix “ed”. Unfortunatelly English verbs are too simple to represent verbs as such. They have no declination (except genitiv) and I would say at most 5 forms – leave, left, left, leaving, leaves.

Now we have Slavonic languages with its complicated verb systems. But let us take Latin which is even more complex. I would say that every verb has at least 100 forms – 6 for future, 6 for futurum exactum, 6 for perfectum, 6 for imperfectum, 6 for present. Combine each of them with passives. There are participium which have declensions.

Some of Latin verbs are also irregular, so one has to “keep apart” all 100 forms of it. Generally speaking I doubt that mind ever process regular verbs using gramatical rules. It must be some automatic process.

Pinker concluded that some regular English forms can be derived by adding “-ed”. Maybe he explained how works darwinian mind using English, but I would say he missed to adress how processed educated western civilisation verbs in Latin for millenia.

And so Pinker is nice example of reductionism – he focused to reduced forms of English words to explain “how our minds work”.
Declension and inflection/conjugation is something that obviously disturb Pinker’s reductionist/simplistic view on how mind can process verbs.

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