Noam Chomsky’s yearlong silence has been mystifying to his legion of readers, including those of us who take a perverse joy in muttering: “There he goes again!”
The world-renowned American linguist, famous for his politically dissident criticism — he once said that “if the Nuremberg laws were applied, every post-war American president would have been hanged” — hasn’t shared his thoughts about the Israel-Hamas war.
A Brazilian newspaper recently outed Chomsky, reporting that he had suffered a stroke last June that left him struggling to speak. His Brazilian wife confirmed last week that he was placed in a Sao Paulo hospital, where he is under the care of a speech therapist, among other specialists.
For Chomsky, who solved the age-old riddle of human speech, what could be more tortuous than being unable to talk?
He is a giant in the scholarly field of linguistics. In fact, other linguists divide the discipline’s history into B.C. and A.C.: before and after Chomsky.
Even though Chomsky, a Jew, has a habit of bad-mouthing Israel in a cheap-shot bid for headlines, I reluctantly recognize him as a native speaker of the ivory tower’s arcane dialect who can also write jargon-free political commentary.
The Onion, of all things, captured the scope and intensity of his reflections on contemporary issues with the 2010 parody story “Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once.”
“I just want to lie in a hammock and have a nice relaxing morning,” the satirical tabloid imagined Chomsky saying, describing him as “an outspoken anarcho-syndicalist academic.”
Chomsky is celebrated for finding a flaw in the existing theory of language, which had assumed that language is a product of experience recorded on the blank slate of the mind.
He asked: If that is so, how does experiencing a ball and then seeing other balls generate the concept of “ball”? And how does the mind differentiate that concept from experiences that generate the concept of “book”?
I recall an afternoon I spent with Chomsky three decades ago. One of the essential skills for a journalist is making an interviewee comfortable. On that occasion, I was unsure if I should present myself as a reporter or a former academic. Then I spotted a volume on his shelf, “Hebrew: The Eternal Language.”
“A copy of that book sits on my shelves,” I said.
As his father, an educator, wrote it, Chomsky talked for hours thereafter. I reluctantly was forced to set aside my misgivings.
He patiently explained his conclusion that the mind isn’t a blank slate. It has a built-in mechanism — “generative syntax,” he dubbed it — that makes humans the only species that can speak.
He explained he came by his distrust of communism, capitalism and pretty much everything in between from an uncle who ran a New York newspaper stand that was a hangout for dissidents.
“First, (my uncle) was a follower of (Leon) Trotsky, then an anti-Trotskyite,” Chomsky said, referring to the Russian revolutionary. “He also taught himself so much of (Sigmund) Freud that he wound up a lay psychoanalyst with a penthouse apartment.”
Linguists generally know a bunch of languages. I can mangle six or seven. But in addition to English, Chomsky explained that he knew only Hebrew. But on that slim foundation, his fertile mind formulated a theory other linguists can’t imagine living without.
According to the Brazilian newspaper, rather than being placed in a rehabilitation program, Chomsky prefers moving to an oceanfront apartment where he could look out at the waves and hear them beating on the shoreline.
Considering his contributions to the scientific study of language and his journalism that has endeared him to so many, I think he has earned the right to make the choice. Don’t you?
Ron Grossman is a Tribune reporter.
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