Noam Chomsky Quotes

It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.

Dumbness comes from the fact that a child is born deaf and that it consequently never learns how to articulate, for it is by the medium of hearing that such instruction is acquired.

The idea of Homo monolinguis - one-languaged man - the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

I love learning language and ideas that I didn't know before and making them sound like my own.

Mum and Dad sent us to a bilingual school, so we had half the lessons in English and half in French. But I remember being hugely lost.

It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay.

I'm a good student. Just trying to learn as much as possible is how I picked up so many languages.

I'm very proud that I have learned German and Russian. Especially Russian, because of how difficult and beautiful it is and because of how much I struggled in the beginning to get my head around how it works.

It is not easy, but young people have to learn languages.

I taught myself German and psychology. Learning about psychology really helped me understand myself and the others around me and it helped keep me sane.

The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.

Each language is a different lens from through which you view the world. So, learn as much as you can!

We humans invented literacy, which means it doesn't come for free with our genes like speech and vision. Every brain has to learn it afresh.

Forget about teaching the children about numbers and colors and the like, and just play with them.

I suppose my ideal brain food is learning languages.

I have an interest in languages and make an effort to learn.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

I think the most important work that is going on has to do with the search for very general and abstract features of what is sometimes called universal grammar: general properties of language that reflect a kind of biological necessity rather than logical necessity; that is, properties of language that are not logically necessary for such a system but which are essential invariant properties of human language and are known without learning. We know these properties but we don't learn them. We simply use our knowledge of these properties as the basis for learning.

Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.