NOAM CHOMSKY

Age: 95
December 7, 1928
 Noam Chomsky is a renowned American linguist,
philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and social critic. He
was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
USA. Chomsky is widely recognized for his groundbreaking
contributions to the field of linguistics, particularly his theory of
generative grammar and the concept of
Chomsky's work in linguistics revolutionized the understanding
of language acquisition and the innate structures underlying
human language. His theory posits that humans are born with
an innate ability to acquire language and that there are universal
grammatical principles shared by all languages.

Apart from his linguistic contributions, Chomsky is also

known for his strong political activism and critical analysis of
social and political issues. He has been an outspoken critic of
U.S. foreign policy, imperialism, and corporate influence on
democracy. Chomsky's writings and speeches cover a wide range
of topics, including media, propaganda, capitalism, human
rights, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Throughout his career, Chomsky has authored numerous

influential books, including "Syntactic Structures," "Language
and Mind," "Manufacturing Consent," and "Understanding
Power." He has received numerous awards and honors for his
scholarly work and activism.

Noam Chomsky continues to be an influential figure in

academia and remains an active voice in political discourse,
advocating for social justice, peace, and human rights.
 FERDINAND DE
SAUSSURE
Nov. 26, 1857 - Feb. 22, 1913
 Ferdinand de Saussure (pronounced [fɛr.di.nã.dɘ.so.ˈsyr])
(November 26, 1857 – February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist
whose ideas laid the foundation for many of the significant
developments in linguistics in the twentieth century. He is widely
considered the "father" of twentieth-century linguistics, and his
work laid the foundation for the approach known as
structuralism in the broader field of the social sciences. Although
his work established the essential framework of future studies,
his ideas contained many limitations and fundamental
weaknesses as later scholars recognized that underlying
structure and rules, while informative, cannot be the sole
determinant of meaning and value in any social system.
Born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1857, Ferdinand de Saussure
was interested in languages early in his life. By age 15, he had
learned Greek, French, German, English, and Latin, and at that
age he also wrote an essay on languages. Coming from a family of
scientists, he began his education at the University of Geneva
studying the natural sciences. He was there a year, and then
convinced his parents to allow him to go to Leipzig in 1876 to
study linguistics.

Two years later at the age of 21, Saussure studied for a year
in Berlin, where he wrote his only full-length work titled Mémoire
sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-
européenes. He returned to Leipzig and was awarded his
doctorate in 1880. Soon afterwards he relocated to Paris, where
he would lecture on ancient and modern languages for eleven
years before returning to Geneva in 1891.

Living in Geneva, teaching Sanskrit and historical

linguistics, he married there and had two sons. Saussure
continued to lecture at the university for the remainder of his life.
However, it was not until 1906 that Saussure began teaching the
course of "General Linguistics" that would consume the greater
part of his attention until his death in 1913.
 LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
Apr. 1, 1887 – Apr. 18, 1949
Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago in 1887 and died in New
Haven, Connecticut, in 1949. He came to linguistics when it was the
dilettante preoccupation of a few “crow-baited students of literature”; he left
it a branch of science. Bloomfield was the son of Sigmund and Carola Buber
Bloomfield and the nephew of the Indologist Maurice Bloomfield. In 1896 his
family moved to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; the winters of 1898–
1899 and 1900–1901 were spent in Europe. He did not do well in the village
school but was tutored by his mother and gained admittance to the North
Division School in Chicago, graduating in 1903 and going on to Harvard
College. By his own account, his most important Harvard experience was
the discipline of writing daily themes for the merciless scrutiny of Charles
Townsend Copeland. His writings support this judgment: his prose is simply
constructed and, despite technical subject matter, largely consists of
everyday vocabulary.In 1906 Bloomfield received the A.B. and went to the
University of Wisconsin as a graduate assistant in German. The teaching of
German was to be a prominent part of his duties for more than two decades;
in 1923 he published an excellent elementary text. He was unsure whether
to concentrate on literature or linguistics, but the influence of the Germanic
philologist Eduard Prokosch, at that time an instructor in the Wisconsin
department of German, was quickly decisive.

In 1908 Bloomfield transferred to the University of Chicago, to

complete his work for the PH.D. under Francis A. Wood. In March 1909 he
married Alice Sayers of St. Louis. They adopted two children.

Bloomfield’s first position after receiving his PH.D. in June 1909 was
as instructor in German at the University of Cincinnati; after one year he
moved to the University of Illinois at the same rank. In 1913, doubtless in
part because of his completion of An Introduction to the Study of Language
(1914), he was promoted to assistant professor of comparative philology and
German and was granted a year’s leave of absence, which he spent at
Leipzig and Göttingen with such scholars as August Leskien and Karl
Brugmann. His respect for these scholars, as for Prokosch, was abiding.
Once, thirty years later, he said to me that we had learned nothing
important about language not already known to Leskien.
 EDWARD SAPIR
Jan. 26, 1884 – Feb. 4, 1939
 Edward Sapir (born January 26, 1884, Lauenburg, Pomerania,
Germany [now Lębork, Poland]—died February 4, 1939, New Haven,
Connecticut, U.S.) one of the foremost American linguists and
anthropologists of his time, most widely known for his contributions to the
study of North American Indian languages. A founder of ethnolinguistics,
which considers the relationship of culture to language, he was also a
principal developer of the American (descriptive) school of structural
linguistics. Sapir, the son of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, was taken to the
United States at age five. As a graduate student at Columbia University, he
came under the influence of the noted anthropologist Franz Boas, who
directed his attention to the rich possibilities of linguistic anthropology. For
about six years he studied the languages of the Yana, Paiute, and other
indigenous peoples in the western United States.

From 1910 to 1925 Sapir served as chief of anthropology for the

Canadian National Museum, Ottawa, where he made a steady contribution
to ethnology. One of his more important monographs concerned cultural
change among American Indians (1916). He also devoted attention to Indian
languages west of the Continental Divide. He joined the faculty of the
University of Chicago in 1925 and in 1929 suggested that the vast number
of Indian languages of the United States and Canada and certain of those of
Mexico and Central America could be classified in six major divisions.
In 1931 he accepted a professorship at Yale University, where he
established the department of anthropology and remained active until two
years before his death.

Sapir suggested that humans perceive the world principally through

language. He wrote many articles on the relationship of language to culture.
A thorough description of a linguistic structure and its function in speech
might, he wrote in 1931, provide insight into humans’ perceptive and
cognitive faculties and help explain the diverse behaviour among peoples of
different cultural backgrounds. He also did considerable research in
comparative and historical linguistics. A poet, an essayist, and a composer,
as well as a brilliant scholar, Sapir wrote in a crisp and lucid fashion that
earned him considerable literary repute. His publications included Language
(1921), which was most influential, and a collection of essays, Selected
Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality (1949).
 ROMAN JAKOBSON
Oct. 10, 1896 – Jul. 18, 1982
 A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the
most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century.
With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new
techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect
founding the modern discipline of phonology. Jakobson went on
to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other
aspects of language such as syntax, morphology and semantics.
He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most
notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the
categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from C. S.
Peirce's semiotics, as well as from communication theory and
cybernetics, he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry,
music, the visual arts, and cinema.

Through his decisive influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and

Roland Barthes, among others, Jakobson became a pivotal figure
in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond
linguistics, including philosophy, anthropology and literary
theory; his development of the approach pioneered by Ferdinand
de Saussure, known as "structuralism", became a major post-war
intellectual movement in Europe and the United States.
Meanwhile, though the influence of structuralism declined during
the 1970s, Jakobson's work has continued to receive attention in
linguistic anthropology, especially through the ethnography of
communication developed by Dell Hymes and the semiotics of
culture developed by Jakobson's former student Michael
Silverstein. Jakobson's concept of underlying linguistic
universals, particularly his celebrated theory of distinctive
features, decisively influenced the early thinking of Noam
Chomsky, who became the dominant figure in theoretical
linguistics during the second half of the twentieth century.
WILHELM VON
HUMBOLDT
Jun. 22, 1767 – Apr. 8,
1835
 Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14
September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath,
geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic
philosophy and science.[2] He was the younger brother of the
Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von
Humboldt (1767–1835).[3][4][5] Humboldt's quantitative work on
botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of
biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic
geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and
meteorological monitoring. Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt
travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing
them for the first time from a non-Spanish European scientific
point of view. His description of the journey was written up and
published in several volumes over 21 years. Humboldt was one of
the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic
Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular).

Humboldt resurrected the use of the word cosmos from the

ancient Greek and assigned it to his multivolume treatise,
Kosmos, in which he sought to unify diverse branches of
scientific knowledge and culture. This important work also
motivated a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting
entity,[8] which introduced concepts of ecology leading to ideas of
environmentalism. In 1800, and again in 1831, he described
scientifically, on the basis of observations generated during his
travels, local impacts of development causing human-induced
climate change.

Humboldt is seen as "the father of ecology" and "the father

of environmentalism".
 JOSEPH GREENBERG
May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001
 Joseph H. Greenberg, (born May 28, 1915, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
—died May 7, 2001, Stanford, California), American anthropologist and
linguist specializing in African languages and in language universals.
Greenberg was the first to present a unified classification of African
languages. Having studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University
(B.A., 1936), Greenberg earned a Ph.D. in anthropology (1940) from
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied with Melville
J. Herskovits. He served in the U.S. Army from 1940 to 1945, then taught at
the University of Minnesota (1946–48) and Columbia University (1948–62)
before becoming a professor of anthropology at Stanford University (1962–
85; thereafter professor emeritus). While teaching at Columbia, Greenberg
published Studies in African Linguistic Classification (1955; expanded and
rev. 1963 as The Languages of Africa). From the time of its publication, the
work has been controversial. Some linguists consider it the most influential
study on African languages, while others find Greenberg’s work to be only a
modification of the earlier classification scheme of Diedrich Westermann.

Originally Greenberg posited 16 families of African languages; in the

revised edition he presented only four—Niger-Kordofanian (now called Niger-
Congo), Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan—each of which is further
subdivided. Greenberg claimed to have arrived at this conclusion by use of
mass comparison, a somewhat dubious method he developed that uses
similarities in vocabularies among languages to show genetic relation (the
method is often criticized for building hypotheses without real evidence).
Subsequent discoveries have refined some of his internal divisions, though
most of his conclusions are generally accepted.

Greenberg’s studies on language universals are less controversial than

his classification studies. In 1966 he published “Some Universals of
Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements.” In
this article he offered 45 universals of word order and inflectional categories
based on data from some 30 languages. He was among the first to deal with
“implicational” universals (of the form “If A, then B”). He also edited
Universals of Language (1963) and the four-volume Universals of Human
Language (1978).
 DMITRI BORGMANNN
Aug. 22, 1927 – Dec.7, 1985
 Dmitri Alfred Borgmann (October 22, 1927 – December
7, 1985) was a German-American author best known for his work
in recreational linguistics. Borgmann was born on October
22, 1927, in Berlin, Germany, to Hans and Lisa Borgmann.
Fearing that the Nazi government would discover Lisa's Jewish
ancestry, the family fled to the United States in 1936, and settled
in Chicago. Borgmann graduated from the University of Chicago
in 1946 and found work as an actuary. In 1964 he quit his job to
focus on his writing. In 1971 he started his own research and
manuscript writing business, INTELLEX, which employed up to
15 writers at a time to ghost-write and edit short stories,
academic books, and TV and movie scripts. Borgmann eventually
relocated the company and his family to Dayton, Washington.

Borgmann first attracted media attention for his skill with

words in 1958, when over the course of eight weeks he defeated
22 challengers in a row on WGN-TV's It's In The Name, winning
nearly $3,800. Around this time he also started contributing
word puzzles and trivia to "Line o' Type or Two", a column in the
Chicago Tribune. Much of this material was mined from back
issues of The Enigma, the official journal of the National Puzzlers'
League which he had joined in 1956. By 1964 he had established
himself as "the country's leading authority on word play", a
designation he continued to hold up until the time of his death.

His first book, Language on Vacation: An Olio of

Orthographical Oddities, was published by Scribner's in 1965,
and received critical acclaim from major magazines and literary
journals, including Time and Scientific American. Today it is best
remembered for popularizing the word logology to refer to the
field of recreational linguistics; Borgmann himself is often
referred to now as the "Father of Logology".
 SIBAWAYH
760 AD – 796 AD
 Sibawayh (Arabic: ‫ ;ِس يَبَو ْيه‬c. 760–796), whose full name is Abu
Bishr Amr ibn Uthman ibn Qanbar al-Basri ( ‫َأُبو ِبْش ر َع ْم رْو ٱْبن ُع ْثَم ان ٱْبن‬
‫َقْنَبر ٱْلَبْص ِرّي‬, ʿAbū Bishr ʿAmr ibn ʿUthmān ibn Qanbar al-Baṣrīy),
was a Persian leading grammarian of Basra and author of the
earliest Arabic linguistics books. His famous unnamed work,
referred to as Al-Kitab, or “The Book”, is a five volume seminal
encyclopedic grammar of the Arabic language.

Born ca. 143/760, Sībawayh was from Shiraz, in Fars

Province Iran. Reports vary, some say he went first to Basra, then
to Baghdad, and finally back to the village of al-Baida near Shiraz
where he died between 177/793 and 180/796, while another
says he died in Basra in 161/777. His Persian nickname Sibuyah
(Arabized as Sībawayh) – “odour of apples” – reportedly refers to
his “sweet breath.” A protégé of the Banu Harith b. Ka’b b. ‘Amr
b. ‘Ulah b. Khalid b. Malik b. Udad, he learned the dialects
(languages) from Abu al-Khattab al-Akhfash al-Akbar (the Elder)
and others. He came to Iraq in the days of Harun al-Rashid when
he was thirty-two years old and died in Persia when he was over
forty. He was a student of the two eminent grammarians Yunus
ibn Habib and Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, to whom, the
latter, he was most indebted.
 PANINI
460 BC – 520 BC
 Panini was born in Shalatula, a town near to Attock on the
Indus river in present day Pakistan. The dates given for Panini
are pure guesses. Experts give dates in the 4th , 5th , 6th and
7th century BC and there is also no agreement among historians
about the extent of the work which he undertook. What is in little
doubt is that, given the period in which he worked, he is one of
the most innovative people in the whole development of
knowledge. We will say a little more below about how historians
have gone about trying to pinpoint the date when Panini lived.

Panini was a Sanskrit grammarian who gave a

comprehensive and scientific theory of phonetics, phonology, and
morphology. Sanskrit was the classical literary language of the
Indian Hindus and Panini is considered the founder of the
language and literature. It is interesting to note that the word
"Sanskrit" means "complete" or "perfect" and it was thought of as
the divine language, or language of the gods.

A treatise called Astadhyayi (or Astaka ) is Panini's major

work. It consists of eight chapters, each subdivided into quarter
chapters. In this work Panini distinguishes between the language
of sacred texts and the usual language of communication. Panini
gives formal production rules and definitions to describe Sanskrit
grammar. Starting with about 1700 basic elements like nouns,
verbs, vowels, consonants he put them into classes. The
construction of sentences, compound nouns etc. is explained as
ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner
similar to modern theory. In many ways Panini's constructions
are similar to the way that a mathematical function is defined

today.