At a young age…
- Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, the older son of a professor of Hebrew who had emigrated from Russia in 1913.
- From early childhood he always displayed linguistic carefulness
- At 10 he was able to read his father’s edition of a Hebrew grammar of the 13th century
School life…
- In 1945 Noam Chomsky enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy and Arabic while living at home and teaching at a Hebrew school
- In his second 2 years of University his interest were more involved with socialism and Zionism (a worldwide Jewish movement that resulted in the establishment and development of the state of Israel.)
- Noam wished he could of drop out of school to go to Israel and promote Arab-Jewish cooperation in a socialist framework
- In 1949 (the year he married) he earned a B.A. with graduate courses in linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, and Hebrew
- In 1955 Noam earned his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania for a thesis on “Transformational Analysis.”
- Also in that year noam Chomsky became an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in 1961, a full professor.
Teachings, opinions, philosophies…
- Noam Chomsky’s description of his goal as a linguist: “To find the principles common to all languages that enable people to speak creatively and freely”
- Chomsky’s work implies that an understanding of the rules of a language throws light on the principles that regulate human thought.
- Noam’s challenging of traditional views of how language develops, is considered to have revolutionized the study of linguistics.
- His first book, ‘Syntactic Structures’, published in 1957, outlines his system of transformational grammar. He also published ‘Manufacturing Consent’, the media is filter through a number of lenses before information reaches the public. And ‘Failed States’, a society ruled by corporate powers that work hand in hand with government to enlarge their own profits and suppress the needs and desires of a majority of the American people
- He deeply mistrusts the US government, business and, yes, the press, all of which he sees as serving the same ingratiating capitalist system
- Language, he has taught, is generated through an inborn ability in the individual. Once generated, language is liable to infinite creative variation
- Chomsky has aimed to expose much of U.S. policy as a mask for irresponsible power and unjustified privilege, and he has insisted that the so-called free press promotes a ineffective conventionality in American intellectual life
