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Noam Chomsky Facts & Worksheets

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist.

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Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics”, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.

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Key Facts & Information

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

  • Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents, Ze’ev “William” Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Jewish immigrants.
  • Noam was the eldest; his younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was born five years later, in 1934.
  • Chomsky attended the independent Deweyite Oak Lane Country Day School and Philadelphia’s Central High School, where he excelled academically and joined various clubs and societies, but was troubled by the school’s hierarchical and regimented teaching methods. He also attended Hebrew High School at Gratz College, where his father taught.
  • He wrote his first article at age 10, on the spread of fascism following the fall of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and, from the age of 12 or 13, identified with anarchist politics.
  • He later described his discovery of anarchism as “a lucky accident” that made him critical of Stalinism and other forms of Marxism–Leninism.
  • In 1945, aged 16, Chomsky began a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages and developed a primary interest in learning Arabic.
  • In 1949, Chomsky married educational specialist Carol Schatz, a woman he had known since childhood. The relationship lasted for 59 years until she died from cancer in 2008. They had three children together.
  • Chomsky continued at the University of Pennsylvania and completed some of his research and writing at Harvard University. His dissertation eventually explored several ideas that he would soon lay out in one of his best-known books on linguistics, Syntactic Structures (1957).
  • Chomsky also read other political thinkers: anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Diego Abad de Santillán, democratic socialists George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Dwight Macdonald, and works by Marxists Karl Liebknecht, Karl Korsch, and Rosa Luxemburg.

LINGUISTIC THEORY

  • Chomsky introduced transformational grammar to linguistics.
  • His theory asserts that languages are innate and that the differences we see are only due to parameters developed over time in our brains, helping to explain why children are able to learn different languages more easily than adults.
  • One of his most famous contributions to linguistics is what his contemporaries have called the Chomsky Hierarchy, a division of grammar into groups, moving up or down in their expressive abilities.
  • These ideas have had huge ramifications in fields such as modern psychology and philosophy, both answering and raising questions about human nature and how we process information.

POLITICS AND CONTROVERSIES

  • Chomsky is a prominent political dissident. He usually identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or libertarian socialist.
  • He views these positions not as precise political theories but as ideals that he thinks best meet human needs: liberty, community, and freedom of association.
  • Chomsky believes that politics lies outside the remit of science.
    In 1967, The New York Review of Books published his essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”.
  • In light of the Vietnam War, which Chomsky adamantly opposed, he addressed what he saw as a disgracefully resigned intellectual community.
  • In a 1977 article Chomsky co-authored with Edward S. Herman in The Nation, he questioned the credibility of the reporting of atrocities under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and suggested some reports were propaganda to “place the role of the United States in a more favorable light”.
  • In 1979, Chomsky signed a petition in support of the free speech rights of Robert Faurisson. As a result, Chomsky found himself in the middle of a heated controversy, and in response, asserted that his views were “diametrically opposed” to Faurisson’s conclusions and his intent was to support Faurisson’s civil liberties, not his Holocaust denial.

LATER LIFE

  • In 2014, at the age of 85, Chomsky remarried, to Valeria Wasserman.
  • He won an honorary fellowship at the Literary and Historical Society in 2005. Two years later, he received The Uppsala University Honorary Doctor’s degree in 2007, named after Carolus Linnaeus.
  • He was honored with the President’s Medal from the Literary and Debating Society of the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2008. Chomsky has been serving as an honorary member of The International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) since 2009.

Noam Chomsky Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about the Noam Chomsky across 21 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Noam Chomsky worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Avram Noam Chomsky who is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics”, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • Noam Chomsky Facts
  • Noam Profile
  • True or False?
  • Chomsky’s Books
  • Achievements
  • Word Bank
  • Chomsky Hierarchy
  • About Politics
  • Word Search
  • Breaking News
  • Acrostic Poem

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