What's the Sanskrit for "Basic Instinct"?

I've been reading The Language Instinct, by Stephen Pinker (left) which is the standard popular work on modern linguistics. Fascinating stuff.

For example, it has been shown that any devoted mothers who read to their unborn children, or attempt to 'hothouse' their newborns by teaching them language are wasting their time. Young children have a far higher ability to acquire language than their parents. This is proved by the example of those who speak 'pidgin' dialects - languages created among a disparate group of adults who do not share a language, such as prisoners in island colonies. Pidgin dialects generally have very basic grammatical forms, and they are easy to misunderstand as a result.

But the children of pidgin-speakers make this right, by instinctively creating from nothing a far more complex version of the pidgin, with a firm but supple grammatical structure. The result of this second generation is a new language, called a creole. A creole is not in any way inferior to one of the parent languages, such as English or French. Even a single child, with pidgin-speaking parents, will develop a creole of his own.

From such evidence, Pinker and others, notably Noam Chomsky, suppose that there is an instinctive grammar built in to the human mind. They call it 'mentalese', and all languages are a translation from mentalese into the spoken word.

(I read a chapter before going to sleep the other night, and just as I was dropping off I had a remarkable experience. My mind seemed to slip into a realm of meaning without words, and I watched, at it were, random phrases and sentences forming themselves without any effort from out of this curious space. This seems to explain how we can have long conversations in dreams that are apparently full of meaning - but a meaning that is forever just out of reach. What is happening in dreams - it now seems to me - is that our unconscious mind is playing with its easy, instinctive ability to construct sentences. Whether or not there is sometimes a higher import in the dreams, I don't know. But what I caught sight of, I think, was the mechanism of language. Thank you, Mr Pinker ...)

Now, I would be unwilling to say that "mentalese" is, exactly. But it seems to me that anyone who wants to make special claims for Sanskrit as being close to some kind of "unknown tongue", the natural language of meaning, ought to be familiar with the research of Chomsky and others (I've just checked the index, and Sanskrit is not mentioned once, although Indo-European gets five references).

I'm not trying to 'have a go' here - but although Chomsky is the single most academically-cited living author, I have never heard any of this in the School. Maybe it doesn't help that he is a political dissident. I would suggest that if we are to have a Language faculty, rather than just a Sanskrit one, then we need to be abreast of the latest research, and respond to it. It would be interesting to hear whether anyone has studied modern linguistics, and if so what views have been formed.