Author Archives: Raf Salkie

More in defence of Chomsky

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I agree with Tim that the Guardian article said some stupid things about Chomsky. It’s a pity, because in the first half, Harry Ritchie says some excellent things about language and social class (‘Don’t improve your grammar’, Review, 4 January). When he turns to Chomsky, though, his ignorance is equalled only by his arrogance. Only someone who does not know the field could say that Chomsky has dominated linguistics since the late 1950’s. This is hogwash: Chomsky routinely refers to his sub-field as a minority interest. Here’s some evidence: while conferences about generative grammar attract tens of participants, many hundreds of academics flock to conferences about pragmatics or sociolinguistics, where Chomsky gets barely a mention.

More evidence of ignorance: Ritchie refers to ‘transformations’ and ‘deep structures’, apparently unaware that these concepts were abandoned by Chomsky decades ago and superseded by others.

On to the arrogance: Ritchie announces with supreme confidence that Chomsky’s claims about innate programming for language are ‘brilliant but wrong’: ‘recent research’ supposedly proves that ‘children learn language just as they learn all their other skills, by experience’. So according to Ritchie, universal untaught human visual abilities (such as recognising three-dimensional objects) are entirely based on experience, and have nothing to do with the genetically programmed structure of the eyes, the optic nerve, or the visual cortex. And learned skills such as riding a bicycle, which not all humans possess, apparently do not depend at all on an innate human ability to balance our bodies. What nonsense! The assertion that these abilities have no innate element is an absurd dogma, reminiscent of the medieval Church rather than serious discussion. The nature, scope and neurological structure of the innate element of language are matters for research and debate: its existence is not.

If you want to see why Tim (rightly) describes the article as ‘shoddy’, you can read it here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/31/one-way-speak-english-standard-spoken-british-linguistics-chomsky

To see what Chomsky actually says, I recommend Chapter 4 of his book New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. You can read much of it in Google books:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=johr4hURMPgC&source=gbs_navlinks_s

 

Car or Kahhhar?

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My grandson, now 16 months, says ‘kahhhar’  (two syllables) when he sees a car.  The ‘hhh’ is a voiceless velar fricative, like the sound in German ‘Ach’ or ‘Achtung’.  Why does he pronounce it like this?  I think it’s because the English consonant sounds /p/, /t// and /k/ are aspirated at the beginning of a word.  Adult English speakers are not consciously aware of it, but to my grandson, the rasping sound between the /k/ and the vowel in ‘car’ is loud and he’s trying to imitate it.

It reminds me of when I spent a term in a French school as a teenager, and the locals used to mock my poor pronunciation: when I said ‘aucune idée’ (no idea), they would mimic it as ‘aukhhhhune’ with a long rasping sound.  French doesn’t aspirate consonant sounds, so they heard a throaty noise between the consonant and the vowel — just like my grandson.

To hear the difference, set Google translate (translate.google.com) to French and listen to the pronunciation of ‘Cannes’ a few times using the microphone icon.  Then set it to English and do the same for ‘can’.