marbuljon:The general consensus seems to be "he said many things that were wrong, some that were right, and didn't say a lot that could have been said. He also didn't exactly look at many different languages (he basically only focused on English). His work is important because it helped diversify linguistics. A few people still believe in what he said."

This is interesting. I just talked to my wife, who did her Ph.D. in linguistics in Germany (so a Dr. phil. to be precise), and asked her about Chomsky. She said, yeah, old bloke, linguist, policitian, left-wing. I was astonished to hear that during her studies she had only marginal contact with his work.

Your quote about Chomsky saying many things that were wrong and some that were right, applies for every human being ever on this planet.

I think your comment is belittelng Chomsky's work. I am not a linguist, but a computer scientist[1][2] and during my studies Chomsky was a big thing. Nowadays, I specialize mostly in language design for specialized domains, and compiler design (so my two best friends are lex and yacc, two dinosaurs as old as Chomsky). Hence, grammars, syntax and parsers are my daily bread and butter and Chomsky lurks behind every corner.

And this is not limited to the Americas. I haven't known a single European computer scientist, who wouldn't have heard of the Chomsky-Schützenberger hierarchy, context free grammars, regular expressions, etc. Maybe Chomsky's biggest impact, albeit he was a linguist, was not in linguistics but in computer science.

sudanglo:But of course the very existence of Esperanto, which by any reasonable criterion, is a human language, makes explicit the extent to which language is a cultural phenomenon. Learning a language is like learning the rules of a game.

I fail to follow your argument. What has the existence of Esperanto to do with the hypothesis that there might be a UG, innate to all humans? Esperanto hasn't added even a single thing to the set of existing grammatical features found in human languages. Nil sub sole novum.
If indeed we aren't born as a tabula rasa, but with a UG somewhere engraved in our brains, which only awaits parametrization to work (and I am neither advocating nor refuting this idea), then Esperanto, if anything, would be evidence in favour of UG and not against it. Somebody invents a constructed language and behold: it is a mix of existing features, all complying with UG (obviously, because they were taken from human languages), and it contains nothing new and so far unbeknownst to man (and possibly not complying to UG).

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[1] "computer science" is a horrible misnomer. I prefer the German "Informatik".
[2] I came to Esperanto in the naive believe that maybe a constructed language was syntactically less ambiguous than natural languages. Big disappointment there.

What do you all think about the idea that all languages have more in common than naught?

robbkvasnak:What do you all think about the idea that all languages have more in common than naught?

There have to be broad similarities, because languages all refer to the same basic things and relations on the same planet.

The best list of what these are that I know of is Aristotle's 10 categories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_%28Aristot...

Maybe neurolinguistics will solve this in one direction or the other.

Yes Kirilo. When we ultimately understand the wiring of the brain, we will be able to say certainly whether there is a built-in grammar engine common to all homo sapiens, and why this results in such a wide variety in the grammars of human languages.

In the meantime, whilst there is no history that can reveal how any particular natural language acquired its grammar - the records don't go back far enough to show how the early humans began to combine words in particular ways to make a grammar - at least it is explicit how this occurred in the case of Esperanto.

And common sense suggests that you no more need to look for an explanation of the variations in grammars than you need a special explanation of why the rules of cricket are different to the rules of baseball.

Of course, Nornen, you could argue that inevitably Zamenhof and all subsequent Esperantists had to conform to the in-built grammar engine, because they were humans. But is there really nothing new in Esperanto? Do other languages have accusative adverbs, the same rules for their equivalent for 'si', or adverbial participles. However you could still argue that any rule that seems specific to Esperanto nevertheless conforms to the (in)famous grammar engine.

At the end of the day, there is nothing mysterious about Esperanto's grammar.

Common sense (if you are an Esperantist) says therefore that language can be entirely a human artifact. A social/cultural phenomenon subject to the same variation as all such things.

It requires an extra leap to suppose to suppose that is biologically determined by a common inheritance. And this grammar engine must be a remarkably flexible piece of wiring to accommodate all the wondrous and many variations that are to be found in the grammars of human languages.

It is a much simpler idea that many languages have certain grammatical features because they match the things we want to talk about, or enable us to talk about things of interest to the community and make distinctions that are important to the community.

From a propaganda point of view any shift in academic thinking which debunks the idea of any special status to natural languages and puts them on a par with constructed languages is to be welcomed.

My students have often asked me why other animals don't talk or whether other animals are capable of communicating as humans do and if they are capable of it whether they do or not. Research on these questions is on-going and the amount of empathy that one beast feels for another (be it of the same species or of another species) has only been documented by anecdotes. There is some evidence that other primates may experience empathy but that they may not be too interested in this so they therefore do not make an attempt to communicate to the extent that they may be capable of such. It is, however, clear that language coupled with culture has enable us to create a material and ideal world that far exceeds that/those of other animals.
Any discussion of the validity of Chomsky's LAD should include results based on the work of Piaget's and Erikson's stages of psychological development was well as the ideas set forth by Vygotsky and Bakhtin (and the research based on their ideas by later scientists). This discussion would then also have to be turned to examine the innate "skills" of humans and other animals and whether and which skills are learned or innate - think of how other animals learn to feed themselves in complex ways that we humans would have to learn but which seem to be innate with those animals - and skills such as nest building, foraging for specific foods, etc. - the hunting instincts of pack animals (or are these learned activities?)
Noam Chomsky is still listened to by people like me. I find him to be a profound thinker (even though I may not always be on exactly the same page as he). His ideas must be pondered and weighed. He is not just somebody talking through his hat. And it is not a clear question of just totally accepting or totally denying his thoughts. We do not live in a world for which we can always find right-wrong answers. Think of how human babies babble and about the experiments by which the researchers found that German babies and French babies react more distinctly to the sounds of their parents' language shortly after birth than they do to the languages of the other set. Surely there is a lot for us to discover yet before we can more accurately describe how L1 is acquired.

sudanglo:Learning a language is like learning the rules of a game.

I have always thought that learning a language is like learning a secret code. A code known only by the speakers of that language.

Amike.

sudanglo:Do other languages have accusative adverbs, the same rules for their equivalent for 'si', or adverbial participles.

Swedish has exactly the same rules for the use of its reciprocal pronoun "sig", the equivalent of "si".
In many languages you use different forms of adverbs to indicate direction versus location (like "hem", "hemma" in Swedish). If the ending of one of them happens to coincide with the accusative ending is an irrelevant detail.
Is it not quite normal that participles play an adverbial role in a phrase, even if it is not indicated by an ending -e in other languages?

nornen:I just talked to my wife, who did her Ph.D. in linguistics in Germany (so a Dr. phil. to be precise), and asked her about Chomsky. She said, yeah, old bloke, linguist, policitian, left-wing. I was astonished to hear that during her studies she had only marginal contact with his work.

The appearace of Chomsky was quite traumatic for many European universities. Researchers who had spent a big part of their lives to qualify for a post as a professor or lecturer, found that they did not understand anything what was written in some new journals. They feared that some collegue of them, who had spent some years in the United States, perhaps as a disciple of Chomsky, would come home and take the post they aspired for. Some universities solved the matter so, that the old institutions continued their comparative work, while the Chomskyists were given new institutions, in some cases at the faculty for engeneering sciences or something like that.

nornen:I haven't known a single European computer scientist, who wouldn't have heard of the Chomsky-Schützenberger hierarchy, context free grammars, regular expressions, etc. Maybe Chomsky's biggest impact, albeit he was a linguist, was not in linguistics but in computer science.

Even when you study mathematics you meet his theories. It is not until I started reading the lernu! discussions, that I found that Chomsky was considered as somebody to be for or against. I think it is because he has said that Esperanto is not a language. I think he means, that Esperanto is not a good empirical basis for any conclusions about the nature of human languages. And one obvious reason for that is, that if you want to find out if human languages are produced by rules, then you should not chose one which is proclaimed to be produced by rules.

noren:
[2] I came to Esperanto in the naive believe that maybe a constructed language was syntactically less ambiguous than natural languages. Big disappointment there.

As a Swedish speaking child I was told that Finnish was completley different from Swedish. When I started learning Finnish, when I was ten years old, I was disappointed. It was not very different. Perhaps it has been influenced by Swedish, I thought. Later I studied Chinese. It had developed so far away from Europe - it should be different. No, it was not. When I learned African languages disappointment again. Some few boring transformation rules, and you come from one language to another. So if you expect languages to be different, then you will find that they are not very interesting. But instead another interesting thing emerges: Why are they so similar? And why are the rules so similar for all games all over the world - cricket and icehockey etc?

The works of Jung are very interesting in discussing the universalities of human narration - and Freud in the human psyche

We do not live in a world for which we can always find right-wrong answers.

As a general proposition, I suppose this must be true, Robb.

But how exactly could the idea that there is a biologically determined grammar engine which all human languages have to conform to be both right and wrong?

Do you imagine that some elements of grammar are universal and the rest we can make up (ie are culturally determined) as we please?