As a person who has been practicing Noam Choamsky's ideas for the last 50 years,
I felt it important for me to introduce his views, especially his thoughts about language with Kannada readers.
That is the main reason behind writing  this book, Chaamski jote eradu hejje.
Noam Chomsky is a one of the greatest thinkers of our times.
Apart from his thoughts about language, his thoughts on economics, politics, society are also highly influential.
But here, my main objective is to introduce his thoughts on language.
I am trying to explain Why Chomsky's thoughts on language are important.
When Chomsky started publishing on this subject in around 1950,
thoughts on language were controlled by behavioral psychology.
Language was an acquired characteristic.
Humans learn from what is available in nature.
So language is a behavior.
It will have a stimulus.
It will have a response.
It is explain ed through this chain.
Even now, in Kannada this is the primary thought.
Even after 70 years, this has not changed.
But Chomsky's studies have looked into the issues in understanding of behavioral psychology.
Is language really a character acquired by human?
Or, is it an existing quality that just gets exposed on its own?
He thought this way.
But before that, he started with reasons for, why can't or why won't children learn the language?
why is it wrong to say that children learn the language.
When it comes to other learning, there is should be a person who teaches and learning resources.
Learning is a constant process.
There is nothing called ideal or complete learning.
This aspects are seen.
For example, let us say you learn swimming, cycling or playing chess.
For all these, you need a coach.
There is a learning period.
You learn music at a fixed time.
But if you look at a child learning, you do not see any learning resources.
Even the resources they get are in bits and pieces.
Chomsky calls this Poverty of Stimuli.
When a child looks for something to learn from the nature
all they get is broken sentences,
and not the ones they need.
Sentences that are out-of-context.
And, nobody can teach a child.
Also, nobody devotes time to teach. Be it parents, caretakers, or other family members.
Once the child learns the language, the efficiency of that language does not increase
The efficiency stays same as long as you live.
You might increase your vocabulary.
Or, there might be an increase in the situations where you use the language.
But the efficiency of language is something one gets instantaneously.
There is no evolution in that.
Considering all these, Chomsky hypothesized that a child does not learn the language
It is associated with them.
It only takes shape during their lifetime.
To prove this hypothesis, he started presenting his case.
The most important fact he mentioned is
Language is an organ.
It has a biological basis. It is a quality that comes by birth.
It resides in a kid's brain.
This quality wakes up suddenly at some point during the kid's development.
For example, a bird learns to fly.
A kid learns to walk.
Nobody teaches a kid to walk.
One can help a kid walk, but cannot really teach how to walk.
Kid starts walking on its own.
When we say kid learned to walk, it means they started walking between birth and some other incident.
There is another theory that this deep-seated quality in the kid's brain develops completely between 18 and 36 months.
So, what causes this development?
For this, Chomsky says there is something called Universal Grammar.
There might be thousands of languages across the world,
But certain qualities are common for all these languages.
These qualities constitute Universal Grammar or UG.
We should not misunderstand UG as a huge container containing qualities of all languages.
UG is basically the quality that has contains all basic ingredients of a human's ability of language.
It resides in human brain.
Chomsky didn't have the resources to present this hypothesis.
For this, he got help from other branches.
He was influenced by Turin's research on computation.
Some of these questions existed even during Europe's enlightenment period.
For example, even Darwin has this issue.
How did the ability of language come to human?
Why didn't it come up for other animals?
Why didn't it come to monkeys, who were the earliest stage?
Darwin had this question.
His contemporary,  Wallace, had raised this question.
He used to say that there is a missing link which theory of evolution has not captured.
This question existed for some 300 years.
For that, you get clues in computational theory.
He realized that one can devise maximum outputs from minimum resources.
In computational theory, we say that you can create infinite outcomes from minimum resources at your disposal.
The limit is only for the resources and not the outcomes.
Even in the language, the sounds in a language is probably about 40.
But there are millions of words using which you can create infinite number of sentences.
And all these sentences are new.
We will not say the same sentences which we hear or we are told.
We will not say the sentences which we ourselves create.
How come a human does not have any limit on creating or the ability to create these new sentences?
How is that possible for humans?
So, the UG existing in human's mind probably has this ability,
The ability to create unlimited outcomes from limited resources.
Noam Chomsky gave a hint of this when he wrote Syntactic Structures in 1957.
The primary feature of a language is that when we put in limited resources on one side, unlimited outcomes of creating sentences appear on the other side.
The Universal Grammar in  human being evolves as language.
It can evolve as one language or multiple languages.
