  The idea of cumulative niche construction has obvious application to  the case of language. If parents shape the linguistic environment of  their offspring, and if we all shape the linguistic environments of  our conspecifics (merely by talking to them!) then the possibility of a ‘linguistic ratchet effect’ is clearly open. Small  changes made to the language of the group by one generation —  changes which perhaps make it easier to learn, or easier to  understand or produce — will be transmitted to later  generations, who may in turn make further changes geared to  increasing language learnability and ease of use. This scenario  raises the possibility, already mentioned at the end of the last  section, that language may have evolved so as to be learnable and  usable by us, in addition to the converse scenario (stressed in much  work on the evolution of language) that we had to change in  many and complex ways in order to learn and use a language. Thus, we  might speculate, languages' phonetic systems evolved so as to be  congenial to our animal ears; their expressive resources (in  particular, their vocabularies) evolved so as to fit our  communicative needs; and perhaps, as Clark 1997 has suggested and as  Tomasello 2003 implicitly takes for granted, natural language syntax evolved so as to suit our pre-existing cognitive and processing  capacities. To be sure, the languages we have coded in our heads look complex and weird to linguists and psychologists and philosophers who are trying to put together theories about them. But, if languages and human minds have evolved in tandem, as surely they have, then  languages may not look weird at all from the point of view of the  brains that implement and use them.