In fact, very high barely says it. The man was…in…orbit. He had made over an entire field of study in his own likeness and put his name on it. If anybody brought up the subject of linguistics, two words inevitably followed: Noam Chomsky. After all, in 2002, so old (at seventy-three) he was already a professor emeritus, he had topped even himself. He had discovered and, as linguistics’ reigning authority, decreed the Law of Recur— OOOF!—right into the solar plexus!—a twenty-five-thousand-word article in the August–October 2005 issue of Current Anthropology entitled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” by one Daniel L. Everett. Pirahã was apparently a language spoken by several hundred—estimates ranged from 250 to 500—members of a tribe, the Pirahã (pronounced Pee-daa-hannh), isolated deep within Brazil’s vast Amazon basin (2,670,000 square miles, about 40 percent of South America’s entire landmass). Ordinarily, Chomsky was bored brainless by all those tiny little languages that old-fashioned flycatchers like Everett were still bringing back from out in “the field.”
What do You think about The Kingdom Of Speech (2016)?
