>
> Even so, I was surprised to read inept, know-nothing
> 'critiques' of Chomsky's linguistic work.
>
> The number of people who truly understand Chomsky's
> ideas in his primary field, well enough to
> intelligently dispute all or parts of it, is very
> small indeed. Yet this dosen't stop a fair number of
> the diehard Chomsky haters from simply declaring,
> based upon their hatred, the "idiocy" of generative
> grammar. One poster even claimed a "right wing
> linguist" had "debunked" Chomsky's work -- a funny and
> disturbingly thick-headed assertion for many reasons.
About a decade ago, there was a four-part series in The Forward attempting to relate Chomsky's politics and linguistics. I don't recall the details, but the basic idea was that Chomsky's notion of Universal Grammar was an attempt to downgrade any attachment to Hebrew as a language of interest (if all languages are the same, why pay any attention to Hebrew?), and went along with his being a self-hating Jew, etc. Really quite deranged. I couldn't believe it.
Incidentally, it was given to me by someone who was one of several elderly folk (in his late 70s then, sadly no longer alive) very active in the Philadelphia secular Jewish community. He and his siblings had studied with Chomsky's father, knew his mother as well, and had attended young Noam's bar mitzvah. I told them about Chomsky's comment in one of the Barsamian interviews about how he held back about regarding Israel while his parents were still alive, and they said yeah, they could understand that.