News of Noam Chomsky’s recent ill health has caused quite a stir lately. Writing a short blog post about the father of modern linguistics will not do justice to this retired Professor, rightly referred to by Jacobin magazine as an “intellectual and moral giant”. While other academics distanced themselves from politics, he insisted on the role of intellectuals in the public sphere, as in, for instance, his 1967 essay on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” - a reflective essay initially given as a Harvard speech - that was so impactful it maintained attention for decades. In fact, he was interviewed about it as recently as 2021. He is noted as one of the most cited writers in history. In 1992, MIT News reported that "Professor Chomsky is in illustrious company. The top ten cited sources during the period were: Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, Freud, Chomsky, Hegel and Cicero."
Chomsky was interested in Semitic linguistics at a very young age. He studied both Hebrew and Arabic early on and taught Hebrew to fund his university studies. Being multi-lingual, he was especially interested in general linguistics. His contributions include the idea of “Universal Grammar”, positing that though languages may appear different on the surface, deep down, their structures are similar, as well as the idea that the capacity for language is mostly innate rather than learnt, challenging the behaviourist theories prevalent at the time. My linguistics professors in Cambridge admired him and even wrote books about him though they did not all agree with his theories on psycholinguistics or the biology of language. John Lyons published his book Chomsky in 1970, and Peter Matthews authored numerous publications referring to Chomsky, including Grammatical Theory in the United States: From Bloomfield to Chomsky published in 1993 and Generative Grammar and Linguistic Competence, published in 1979, to name only a few.
After Chomsky’s work in linguistics impacted the philosophy of language and contributed to cognitive science, his writings on politics also generated a huge following. Though he no longer writes or speaks, he is profoundly disturbed by the injustice he perceives around him. Following last year’s stroke, which numbed the right side of his body and affected his speech, Chomsky has been watching the news of Gaza and raising his left arm in “lament and anger”, as reported by his wife recently. The false rumours about his death this week were distressing, especially since he himself had warned about misinformation, being a longstanding critic of news media. The irony!
To be continued.
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