Chomsky Comics

The Adventures of Noam Chomsky by Jeffrey Weston is a series of comics based on Chomsky's political views. While I don't follow Chomsky for his political views and I prefer not to state mine, he is a brilliant linguist and I found this particular comic from the series rather chuckle-worthy.

Flip the Chomsky Switch

On April 14, 2011 the Los Angeles Times published an article about recent research in the field of linguistics titled "Culture trumps biology in language development, study argues." Here is the lede:

"Researchers construct evolutionary trees for four linguistic groups and conclude that cultures, not innate preferences, drive the language rules humans create – contrary to the findings of noted linguists Noam Chomsky and Joseph Greenberg."

On April 19, 2011 Voxy Blog published the following infographic.

Via: Voxy Blog

Coincidence? I think not.

Noam Chomsky in the News

"The government of Israel does not like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the category of, I suppose, every other government in the world."

- Noam Chomsky in response to being blocked by Israeli border guards from entering the West Bank through Jordan, quoted in The Week (May 28, 2010 issue)

I wonder if they would have let this Noam cross the border?

*Spotted on JustSay Gnome!

Noam Chomsky is considered to be one of the fathers of modern linguistics. Click here to read more about Chomsky.

Linguistics Quotation Favorites - Nonsensical Semantics

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

-Noam Chomsky

Syntactically sound but semantically senseless sentence created by Noam Chomsky in 1957 to demonstrate the need for more structured models of grammar.

Diagramming Sentences: The Syntactic Tree

The method of sentence diagramming(shown below) that most high school students still learn today is based on on the work of Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg from 1877.

The sentence diagrams preferred by linguists today are based on the work of Noam Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff and are called syntactic trees. Syntactic trees are preferred because they illustrate the dimensionality of sentences; in other words they show that sentences are more than just strings of words with a flat structure.

All people should be as happy as linguists.