Tag Archives: Noam Chomsky

the word: gracefully conceived

Language is the only vehicle of ideas; if it breaks down, what happens to the ideas?… The curse of the Structural Linguists. The Structural Linguists, in their relativistic approach toward standards of usage, confused the relationship between language and thought. … Continue reading

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freeze a caste system

…How to freeze a caste system while professing only the purest democratic principles… To almost anyone who respects the English language for its grace and beauty, its combination of precision and flexibility, the social philosophy of the Structural Linguists seemed … Continue reading

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Structural Linguists: rareified style

A faint notion of the rarefied realms in which Structural Linguists operated, and the mode in which they wrote, could be easily grasped through a random sampling of the style. From Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky ( 1957): When transformational … Continue reading

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structural linguistics: stone age language

…An abstruse discipline, based on Stone Age cultures is applied to our own language… The primary interest of the linguistician, however, is the sound of language; and it is in the field of phonetics- or, more specifically, phonemics, that Structural … Continue reading

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say look: what’s that sound?

To begin with, the Structural Linguists concern themselves only with the spoken language. The generally low esteem with which they regard writing derives in part from the statistic that only about five per cent of the of the world’s approximately … Continue reading

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structural linguistics: anarchy of the letters and words

…Far more baleful, however, than any of theo ther circumstances contributing to the demise of literacy and the degeneration of English can in some measure, significant measure seen in the abandonment of grammar in favor of what became known as … Continue reading

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look-say method: progressive illiteracy

Student illiteracy? Could the source be the theories and practices of American education as they have luxuriated for the past 60 odd years. John Dewey took much of the blame for the deterioration of educational rigor, the emphasis on adjustment … Continue reading

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napoleon black magic: roads to moscow

The “hidden hand” gesture, international democracy based on property law, and the coming of an age of reason and enlightenment. A golden road leading to the seven pillars of the gates of wisdom?… The promise of the end of serfdom, … Continue reading

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the mono men: back to me, myself and sigh

The Hawkins, Hitchens legacy… The atheist, too, would not dare deny himself a god and why not get personally involved in the god business; they have a god and it is themselves.  You could say that the pagan, the idolator … Continue reading

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cold war: to frozen to believe

The Cold War. Just what was exactly the Cold War? Could it have been avoided?… Iranian troopps entered Tabriz on December 14, 1946, and drove out the remnants of the puppet regime whose local Communist leader, Pishevari, fled to the … Continue reading

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