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Whatsapp Noam Chomsky poses in his office at MIT.

At the age of 87, and with his seminal work 'Syntactic Structures' about to turn 60, Noam Chomsky is still thinking about linguistics. Tiger Webb learns why some of the mysteries surrounding language may never be solved—and why that might not be such a bad thing.

Pity the modern polymath.

Give it a go. Scroll down any self-respecting list of polymaths and one fact emerges—the further into history one goes, the less contentious the pick.

Language is primarily an instrument of thought.

Your dinner party might dismiss Einstein (too specialised) or waver over Hildegard of Bingen (too churchy) but by the time you hit upon da Vinci, you're on comfortable ground.

Go as far back as Socrates and it's smooth sailing. But they had it easy! There was less knowledge floating around in the aggregate, and the knowledge that was around was far less specialised.

Artists commingled with engineers who wrote songs and did philosophy, natural or otherwise.

But it's not as though people decided en masse to stop spreading their talents over a broad array of disciplines.

After all, 12 people have won awards from each of the four major American entertainment industries—an Emmy for television, a Grammy for recorded music, an Oscar for film and a Tony for theatre.

(Though for all her on-screen brilliance, Audrey Hepburn—who completed her "EGOT" in 1994 with a posthumous Grammy for Audrey Hepburn's Enchanted Tales—would probably not be deemed polymathic).

Noam Chomsky (linguist, media theorist, philosopher, etc) on the other hand, manages to pull off the epithet.

Yet even in the realm of modern linguistics—a discipline many credit him with creating—there are things he does not know.

The mystery, Chomsky says, is language itself, and it harkens back to what he terms 'the Galilean challenge'.

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Whatsapp Noam Chomsky's enduring appeal inspired this Philadelphia mural.

Galileo, and his fellow philosophers of the scientific revolution, weren't the first to pose questions about the nature of language—de Saussure's early-20th century concept of the signifier and the sign had been evoked millennia before by Plato, after all.

The Galilean mindset was novel because he regarded language as an invention.

The 'challenge', after that, became a deceptively simple one: how should we conceive of language?

One lens through which spoken language has been viewed (by linguists, at least—regular people don't often stop to think about language structure which is probably how so much manages to get done) is in terms of phonology: the inventory of a given language's sounds, the place and manner of their articulation, and how shifts in vowel length or position aid or hinder intelligibility between speakers.

Language, it is assumed in this view, is a function of physiological adaptation—at some point in our evolutionary history, our tongues became capable of the species-specific gymnastics that eventually became known as speech. Or perhaps a laryngeal drop aided in the production of phonation. Whatever.

Chomsky sees this focus on how language developed as dodging the far more critical question of why language developed at all. What purpose does a system such as language work toward?

Or, as Chomsky puts that same question: 'What's the nature of the combinatorial and generative system that yields an infinite array of structured expressions, each of which expresses a thought with a finite base?'

When that why—that Galilean challenge—takes centre-stage, any evolutionary explanation for language seems akin to a coward's way out.

Accordingly, Chomsky has very little truck with the idea that human language is merely a biologically-enabled form of communication, an extension of birdsong.

'The externalisation of language to some sensory motor system—articulation is the usual one—is peripheral to the core nature of language.'

'Language,' he says, 'is primarily an instrument of thought.' How that thought is conveyed through articulators—be that speech, text or sign—is mostly a secondary question.

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Whatsapp The mechanical philosophy viewed physical phenomena as reducible to machine components

Galileo's contemporaries (Descartes was one of them) viewed the universe as a machine.

This was classical mechanics: the world as a system of gears and levers, celestial movements the interplay of force multipliers and energy dissipation.

(If a Creator existed, as many believed, He or She would take the form of a super-skilled mechanic)

'That,' Chomsky says, 'was the mechanical philosophy—just a more complicated version of the fascinating automata that were literally being constructed at the time.'

But machines have component parts. They must, by their nature, be divisible. If language was an extension of the human machine, what are its smallest parts? How should we define words?

This, to Chomsky, is the second part of the Galilean challenge.

'Any combinatorial system begins with atoms: things that are unanalysable from the point of view of the combinatorial system.'

In language, Chomsky says, the atoms would be word-like elements—things imbued with meaning: words like 'river', or 'tree house'.

Words, in a sense, pose an enormous mystery. 'They're completely unknown in animal systems. We have no idea how they evolved, when they evolved, where they came from.

'They're common to all humans. They all have unique meanings.'

Meanings we will never know. The origin of all language—the reconstruction of which was once the goal of philologists the world over—has undergone a shift from 'the hardest problem in science' to a comfortable consensus on a hypothetical European proto-language. And that's where Chomsky thinks it will stay.

'We obviously don't have tape recordings from 200,000 years ago [when Homo sapiens first developed speech faculties]. There aren't any other known avenues to enquire.

'Comparative work with other primates or organisms just doesn't get you anywhere. They don't have these systems.'

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Whatsapp Finding the origin of language is like climbing a dead tree: enjoyable, but ultimately fruitless

Another problem with words, Chomsky says, is that nothing about them is consistent—either internally or externally from the mind.

Compared to the workings of our other internal systems, such as sight or hearing, scientists only have a fledgling understand of the role of the brain in assembling an inner voice.

'We have very little understanding of how each person has [words] innately as part of their fundamental nature, just as ... we have a mammalian visionary system.

'As far as the evolutionary system is concerned, it's a complete blank.'

Lastly, there's the problem of voluntary action—why is Chomsky even talking about language in this interview, rather than any number of infinite other topics that this discrete combinatorial system that is speech affords?

'Right at this minute, I could start talking about the weather outside, or about a baseball game I saw 50 years ago. We are incited to say particular things, but we are not compelled to do so.'

He's wrong, on that score: Chomsky is compelled to answer these questions (at least in part) due to comprehensively-ingrained social structures: 'conversations' or 'interviews'.

For all the recent study of what exactly occurs in the brain during voluntary action, Chomsky notes that the field of research is still in its infancy.

'We're beginning to understand the puppet and the strings, but we have no idea about the puppeteer.'

Modern theory cannot wholly explain or describe the component parts of human language, but by one metric that might not even be a failure.

After all, the mechanical philosophy of Newton—and Liebniz, and Huygens, all the way back to Descartes—didn't last forever. After Newton, Chomsky says, 'The whole approach to science changed in a subtle way.

'Instead of seeking to show that the world is intelligible to us, the goals of science were implicitly lowered to construct theories that are intelligible to us.'

As an example of a theory explaining a non-intelligible world, Chomsky cites the recent confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein.

'That theory,' he says, 'is intelligible to us—but the conception on which it is based, of curved space-time, of quantum principles involved, for Galileo through Hume and Locke and so on, that would have been outside the framework of their science.

'They're intelligible, but the world isn't. It isn't a machine.'

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Whatsapp After a life in words, Noam Chomsky reflects

Humans are not machines either, and there are limits to what we can understand about ourselves.

'Assuming that we're organic creatures, and not angels,' Chomsky says wryly, 'we have certain fixed capacities which yield the range of abilities that we have—but they impose limits as well.

'Our human genome directs us to develop arms and legs, not wings; a mammalian visual system, not an insect one.'

It follows, Chomsky says, that there are hard limits to what humans can understand about the brain, and therefore its language.

Galileo's challenge may never be answered. Ironically, this is hardly a new idea: Locke once theorised that God may have 'super-added' the capacity of thought to certain types of matter.

The how of it, Locke reasoned, was relatively immaterial.

By Darwin's time, this acceptance of our limits was familiar—an intellectual comfy chair.

Darwin himself said that the idea of matter (known substance) producing thought (unknown possible substance) was no more mysterious than matter (known substance) being governed by gravity (mysterious theory).

Chomsky sees the mysteries of the brain in a similar way: '[Thought] is an aspect of matter, just as electrical properties are an aspect of matter.'

Syntactic Structures, Chomsky's first book and a seminal text in modern linguistics, will be 60 years old this year. Chomsky himself is 87.

Asked at the end of the interview to sum up his thoughts, he pauses.

'We are very mysterious, at least to ourselves.

'Maybe somebody else understands.'

Hear the full interview Noam Chomsky reflects on a lifetime in linguistics with Joe Gelonesi.

Subscribe to The Philosopher's Zone on iTunes, ABC Radio or your favourite podcasting app.

