Chomsky was wrong.They taught me a lie. [24:41]

YouTube ^ | May 29, 2026 | languagejones

[SunkenCiv]

I nearly failed out of grad school, defending Chomsky's theory of syntax. Half a decade later, I'm done pretending it was worth it. Chomskyan generative grammar -- X-bar theory, Government and Binding, the Minimalist Program -- was taught to me at the University of Pennsylvania as the only legitimate science of language. It was the gatekeeper, the screener, the thing students were washed out of linguistics PhD programs over. As I've come to discover, decades of work in dependency grammar and construction grammar -- frameworks I was told didn't exist, didn't matter, or had been "subsumed" -- were doing better empirical work the whole time. 

Chomsky was wrong.They taught me a lie. | 24:41 
languagejones | 303K subscribers | 186,116 views | May 29, 2026

[DPMD]

I have been told that chomsky was the recipient of government grants. If so, just your average American communist.

[DPMD]

Make up a language. Sell it to a university. Use it to control students and faculty and make lots of bread and win mobs of adoring - and brain dead - fans.

Sounds like something the moonies and their “Divine Principle” would be envious of.

[Claud]

I dabble in linguistics, but outside of academia. I know nothing about Chomsky’s work because I’ve never had a reason to use it.

Bill Labov, on the other hand, who was also at U Penn before he passed away in 2024, did some absolutely amazing work that I use all the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Labov

He used to be a chemical engineer, and he brought a very scientific approach to dialectology that involved recording people and analyzing the sounds to capture language in motion. Studied the Philadelphia dialect in excruciating detail, which was great for me because that’s what I wanted to study.

And I don’t know anything Chomsky did that is half as useful as this...a map of North American English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlas_of_North_American_English

[BradyLS]

…And the relief of saying that, I can’t even describe it. If you’ve ever been deep in something where the explanations kept not quite working, where you kept having to be told the doubts that you were having were just because you didn’t really fully understand it well enough yet, where the smart people around you kept gently suggesting maybe you weren’t cut out for this, you know, a cult. And then one day you read the right book and the whole thing snaps, and you realize that the doubts were the data, were the facts….

That all sounds like classic gaslighting perpetrated by the Chomskyite faculty of a graduate program in linguistics on the grad student.

[BradyLS]

The video was transcribed. Possible errors in the transcription.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[Honorary Serb]

......In our case, translating an academic paper from a language relevant to your research......

When I was a Harvard biochemistry grad student back in the day, one had to pass two language exams, usually German and French. I was fluent in German, and barely adequate in French, but managed to pass both language exams.

Since then, nearly all the German biology and chemistry journals have become English-language—I don’t know much about the French ones. And here are no language requirement for American and UK biology and chemistry grad students.

[GingisK]

It doesn’t happen to people who get useful degrees.

[sopo]

will am idiot be ablr to understand this, brcause it soumds interesting

[sauropod]

+1

[Pelham]

Having mastered Fadology should guarantee you a senior position in the university of your choice.

Maybe not in the hard sciences, at least not yet.

[Pelham]

Here’s the prank that I half remembered:

The Sokal Affair (1996)

The Prankster: Alan Sokal, a physics professor at NYU.

The Stunt: Sokal wrote a purposefully nonsensical, pseudo-scientific paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”

He intentionally used contradictions, meaningless jargon, and false science to test if a leading cultural studies journal would publish it simply because it sounded good and flattered their ideological biases.

The Result: The journal Social Text published the paper.

Sokal then immediately revealed in another publication that the article was a hoax, sparking a massive, years-long debate in the humanities over academic standards and peer review.

[Pelham]

TL/DR was invented exactly for that post.

[Pelham]

“Make up a language. Sell it to a university. Use it to control students and faculty and make lots of bread and win mobs of adoring - and brain dead - fans.”

Tolkien invented Elvish, twice. Quenya, “high elven”, and Sindarin, for elven commoners.

And Entish too, which goes something like “A-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lindor-burúme”

[dennisw]

Who is demented enough to devote years to studying very advanced linguistics a la Chomsky. This is like a seal proving he can balance a spinning beach ball on his nose. Of course linguistics is a valid field, but the advanced kind looks like intellectual masturbation. That only universities will pay for.

[SunkenCiv]

We owe the hard sciences a lot, not least, Viagra.

[redinIllinois]

.

[gleeaikin]

I thought our leader had outlawed Diversity education. Is this at a US Naval School? Or have they just changed the name but continue to teach the principle, because we have recruits from all backgrounds?

[dennisw]

He was pranking post-modernism and its bllshit lingo. Post-colonialism is anti-white with guaranteed university jobs for blacks/minorities. Thus it has replaced post modernism, that was run by white men and white women/ with heavy gay participation.

Lets get real here. For both of the above, this is the godless and and the mind impaired, doing their best to score nice paychecks for their bullsht musings.

[gleeaikin]

When I was young, I and some friends decided Pig Latin was a useful language to use when we did not want the other kids to know what we were saying. Are there any similar languages that kids were using when you were young?