Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
This is probably the best known phrase in the history of linguistics. When you read it for the first time, it feels like it makes sense, kind of, even though it’s nonsense. Compare it to the phrase.
Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.
That’s gibberish of an entirely different order.
You will know the MIT Professor Noam Chomsky for his politics, for his strident anti-Zionism, his trenchant attacks on American foreign policy and his harsh critique of capitalism. But his reputation rests on his scholarship, without which — I think it’s uncontentious to say — he would have had no solid platform from which to air his contentious views.
For Chomsky transformed the subject of linguistics.
Before Chomsky, many clung to the idea that the mind was a blank slate, a tabula rasa. We learnt language by imitating adults, by being told words and learning the rules for stringing these words together. That’s the picture that Chomsky overturned.
What puzzled him was how children could pick up language so quickly. Most young kids can effortlessly create brand new sentences from their existing vocabulary. They can also understand sentences they’ve never heard before. Chomsky’s fundamental insight — made when he was still in his twenties — was that this was only possible if the mind, our neuro-circuitry, was somehow fixed so as to construct sentences in a certain way. Although “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” and “Furiously sleep ideas green colourless” are both meaningless, we are innately predisposed to recognise that one is grammatically correct and the other is not.
This simple but brilliant idea, from over a half-century ago, made linguistics sexy and Chomsky world famous.
There’s an obvious retort to Chomsky. If language is in some sense innate, how come it has emerged in such radically diverse forms? English and Hebrew and Mandarin don’t seem to have much in common. But Chomsky insists they do. He claims that all languages — unlikely though it seems from listening to them — share a deep universal grammar. He identified various similarities, some quite complex, though there are some basic commonalities, such as a distinction between nouns and verbs, and rules to govern the relationship between the subject of a sentence and its object. It is a scientific spin on the Tower of Babel myth in Genesis.
Although, academically, he has restricted himself to a relatively narrow domain, Chomsky’s work has spilled over into many other areas and opened up fertile new approaches.
If we are innately predisposed to communicate in a certain way, perhaps we’re predisposed in other ways, too. For example, despite some surface distinctions, is it possible that all humans, whether in Beijing, Bethlehem or Birmingham, share a universal morality?
Brought up in Philadelphia, immersed in an East-European Jewish culture, Chomsky spent a short time living on a kibbutz. His original plan had been to stay in Israel, but he returned to the States, disillusioned, convinced that Israeli society was profoundly racist. Nonetheless, his Jewish background shaped his career. Both his parents were Hebrew teachers, the initial fuel for Noam’s interest in linguistics.
In the end, it’s this work for which he’ll be remembered, and not the sound and fury from the podium. Well, plus the fact that he once shared a prison cell with Norman Mailer. But that’s another story.
David Edmonds (@DavidEdmonds100) is the co-author of ‘Wittgenstein’s Poker’