1. The Universal Grammar
I've been reading Chomsky's political writings for decades, but just in the last year have begun reading his linguistic work, which is a revelation. His basic notion is that we have a biological ability to understand language. Many if not all animals have this ability to a limited degree, a very limited degree, but never a total absense of words, which the grammarians insist on calling ‘utterances’ at best, or ‘cries’ at worst. A skilled dog or ape might be able to learn 100 human words, which is impressive, but even little birds and mice have 10 'cries' which they use for communication with other members of their species. But humans have something that is really fundamentally different, since your average human has a vocabulary of at least 10,000 words. The very notion that all animals have a language ability, but ours is fundamentally different, is typical of the domaine of words, where the boundaries between ‘words’ and ‘cries’ and hard to define but also immediately obvious.
What is a word? This is not easy for grammarians to agree on, and some languages are said to have a half million or even a million words, others just a few thousand. There are two ways to define a word in this regard, 1. root words, and 2. the full suite of conjugated words. I think it's best to use the 1st definition of a word. For example, 'read' 'reading' 'reader' 'unread' etc, these are a single root word which has been conjugated into the various forms. By adding every conjugated form of every root word you can arrive at a million. But we don't memorize the conjugations individually, just the roots, and so the language can be seen now as A. the root words, each of which needs to be memorized, and B. the conjugations, which are done through a system. This system, which is grammar proper, requires quite a large amount of memorization as well, but not nearly as much as all the root words one might know, and it can then produce essentially an infinite amount of words, many more than millions in fact. So the 2nd type of counting of words is actually meaningless, since you can easily get to a million in any language, if needs be by counting the compound words as unique words, or by coining new words, not that there is any need for these large numerical totals other then for prestige purposes for languages that feel inferior, like some Peruvian tribal language, or wish to assert their vast array of labeled objects, like French or English.
However, the ability to coin new words is actually quite an interesting ability of which all languages are capable, otherwise it would be doubtful whether they are really languages, or merely totalities of various cries and hoots. I will coin new words right now, never before uttered by any human, which Chomsky points to as one fundamental difference between our words and the animals much more limited use of words. Here I go:
Crapnation - a country that is unpleasant to live in.
Bluethorn - similar to a bluebell or blue-moon, but a sharp thistle on a plant stem, that is blue.
Tenpity - an extreme amount of pity, but which through the corruption of language in my imaginary world, now means a lack of pity.
Tweetplanation - I used this on Twitter today, asking a person for a 'tweetplanation', and they understood what I meant, a one tweet explanation of the tweet I had replied to, which was a tweet composed of a single cryptic declaration. The word is a conjugation of the noun 'tweet' with the declension 'planation', which obviously means 'explanation'. From a grammatical perspective it's very hard to explain why it's obvious that 'planation', a word which on it's own it not at all clearly related to 'explanation', nonetheless becomes understandable when declined. 'Declined' is the term used by grammarians for 'the suffix conjugation of nouns', ‘suffix’ being a grammatical term of art for ‘the end of a word’. I have spent hundreds of hours over several decades banging my head against the wall reading grammars, and thus I know the definition of 'declined', but I have merely memorized the definition of the term by rote. The term is otherwise completely stupid and meaningless, and could just as easily be described as grammar of the 'B6' type. The grammarians themselves do not know why this word is used to describe the suffix conjugation of nouns, it's very old and obscure, but they hypothesize it has to do with the endings of a word, which could be metaphorically seen as the 'decline', with the beginning of a word seen as the 'incline'. No one would ever think this was what was meant, and before I read this etymology of the word I had always assumed it was referring to the ending 'choosing to not have' something, which makes no sense, since 'declensions' are additions to the end of nouns.
Broccolitatorship - I'm pretty certain you read this as a dictatorship which imposes broccoli upon its citizens, or perhaps a fantasy world in which sentient broccoli is in charge of all decision making, BUT NOT as a boat which is made of broccoli and potatoes. This is because it follows grammatical rules, Universal Grammatical rules we could say, whereas the definition as a type of boat is a triple compound word, a type of word that is not generally used by languages. There's nothing ungrammatical about a triple compound word, although I can't think of any off the top of my head, but everyone is familiar with dictatorships. These last two invented words, tweetplanations and broccolitatorships, form a pattern which seems to imply that for some reason the first syllable in a word is not necessary to it's meaning, that somehow 'planation' and 'tatorship' are some sorts of roots or declensions, and that 'ex' and 'dick' are other units of meaning. None of this is obvious, although it is intuitive, which is another point of Chomsky's. These are not things which grammarians talk about, since the grammarians are actually focusing their efforts on laying down rules, not in understanding what makes the various languages work. That is, when we learn another language, and we read about the past tense, future tense, the plural and so on, these actually have very little to do with the way the language works in generating meaningful statements. The ‘rules’ of the grammarians are rather more or less arbitrary and superficial rules of speaking and writing. To use a metaphor, lets say you are eating dinner, the grammarians are concerned with table manners, whereas 'the meaning' of the food is its nutritional substance and health, which we have an instinctual ability to recognize without being tought that shit is unhealthy and grilled steak is very good. As you can see, none of this is related in even the most remote manner to table manners, or methods of ingesting the shit or steak. These are all very strange ideas, and perhaps go quite a ways to explain why Chomsky is so revolutionary in linguistics. This manner of looking at words might have occurred to you, or to me before I read Chomsky, but if me and you are looking at words in terms of 'meaning' and not grammar, this is something actually quite new, begining around perhaps 1900 and really coming to fruition in the 1970's, along with many other fairly hallucinogenic notions, and in regards to grammar, it was Chomsky who was the main thrust of this thinking, beginning when he was a young professor at MIT in the 1970's.
Bluegreenredsuits - a compound word, just as legitimate as timekeeping, microbus, microfiber, sunset, peacekeeper, moreover, and so on. German does this automatically, whereas in English the grammarians want us to write “blue, green, and red suits”, far-flung, do-gooder, etc, etc. The grammarians have books with long lists of the proper way to write every word, which is completely unrelated and irrelevant for speaking, the true meaningful aspect of language, and which is the sole focus for Chomsky. For him the written forms of words is irrelevant. For instance, the grammarians say some compound words should be written with the slash, but in Germany they quite naturally make humungous compound words like Theassisstantdistrictattourneysoffice. But German is basically the same language as English, but the grammatical cultures are totally seperate. In fact, they are so closely related to each other it would be more proper to call English a dialect of German, like Dutch, but no one ever says English is a dialect of German, most likely due to the English grammarians having proper Imperial pride in the transcendent English language, now the most spoken language in the entire world, whereas German is hardly spoken by anyone. Nonetheless, we are descended from German, not the other way around.
Nonetheless - what a strange word. Why not just write none the less? Why mash it up into this outrageous triple compound? Probably this phrase is archaic and not readily understandable on its own, but when made into a single word we can now give it a single definition, and skip the antique grammar entirely, like the B6 class of conjugations. Thatbeingsaid, sorry, that being said, we can probably stop inventing words, since the whole point is to complain about grammarians.
And so hopefully now the hint of some Universal Grammar has been made clear, as well as the answer to the question, "what is a word?" The truth is that a word is actually hard to define, as we have seen. As well as the nature of this Universal Grammar, which Chomsky was never able to figure out, and it continues to remain a hypothesis without any proof. He is now retired from linguistics and says a new generation can pick up where he left off and figure it out. Nonetheless, it seems clear that your ability to parse this gigantic wall of letters which I have written, is an inborn trait we all share as human. As Chomsky says, even a retarded imbecile of a human incapable of doing anything for themselves will more often then not be more fluent in language then the most intelligent apes, dogs, and dolphins. No musician of any degree of skill or genius could ever read sheet music as fluently as you read these words, because you are also doing another step the musician is not doing. You are not just sounding out the sounds I have written down in Latin letters like an idiot, no, but that's literally all that the genius musician is doing. For you that is merely the first trivial step because the meaning is what is critical, otherwise if you were just sounding out the letters you could not be called able to read. Whether or not you have deeply understood every subtle philosophic point I'm making, you have most certainly gotten the gist of my meaning. 'Meaning' of words is so natural to us that we almost pass right over it and think of philosophy, but the basic meaning making, which was Chomskys total focus in linguistics, is so easy for us we almost pay almost no attention to it. For example, "Tomorrow I will call you on your cell phone, then we can make plans for our Christmas vacation in Hawaii", the meaning of this sentence is very clear, and also incredibly powerful and specific, although it contains no philosophical or profound meaning. We don’t realize how incredible and powerful this ability to sort of ‘on the surface’ get the meaning of what we read or hear. This insight also strongly suggests a huge degree of bullshit inherent to philosophy and 'deep meaningful profound writing’, it's often very hard to tell what these deep profound insightful people are saying. These people are really perverts of language, and the way Chomsky speaks about grammar is so refreshingly clear and vivid compared to the "philologists and grammarians of past participles, declensions, gerunds and second tense analysis".