He was a Semitist, working on medieval Hebrew grammar. from Dropsie College, a Hebrew college in Philadelphia. It must have been around 1940 when he got his Ph.D. I read modern Hebrew literature and other texts with my father from a very young age. What first sparked your interest in human language? And it doesn’t seem to be connected with physical changes the articulatory and acoustic systems of contemporary humans are not very different from those of 600,000 years ago. All of a sudden, there’s an explosion of complex artifacts, symbolic representation, measurement of celestial events, complex social structures–a burst of creative activity that almost every expert on prehistory assumes must have been connected with the sudden emergence of language. If you look at the archaeological record, a creative explosion shows up in a narrow window, somewhere between 150,000 and roughly 75,000 years ago. When and how did the power of language arise? That’s how we form plans, do creative art, and develop complex societies. This unique human possession, which we hold in common, is at the core of a large part of our culture and our imaginative intellectual life. If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa. Humans are different from other creatures, and every human is basically identical in this respect. You describe human language as a unique trait. It was Chomsky’s first day back doing interviews, but he wanted to go through with it.” Later, he gave even more time to DISCOVER reporter Valerie Ross, answering her questions from his storied MIT office right up to the moment he dashed off to catch a plane. She died about 10 days before I spoke with him. “Chomsky’s wife was gravely ill, and he was her caretaker.
“It was a very difficult situation,” Long says. When the leaders of the march were arrested, he found himself sharing a cell with Norman Mailer, who described him in his book Armies of the Night as “a slim, sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”Ĭhomsky discussed his ideas with Connecticut journalist Marion Long after numerous canceled interviews.
He was an outspoken critic of American involvement in Vietnam and helped organize the famous 1967 protest march on the Pentagon.
Chomsky also bucked against scientific tradition by becoming active in politics.
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