— Ch. 1 · Childhood In Philadelphia —
Noam Chomsky.
~5 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Noam Chomsky was born on the 7th of December 1928 in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who spoke Yiddish as their first language. William Chomsky fled the Russian Empire to escape conscription and worked in Baltimore sweatshops before attending college. Elsie Simonofsky immigrated from what is now Belarus and spoke a native New York City English dialect. The family placed great emphasis on educating people so they would be free and independent thinkers. Noam's father taught at Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school and joined the Gratz College faculty. He raised his son with a mission to improve the world for all people. Noam faced antisemitism as a child from Philadelphia's Irish and German communities. He attended Oak Lane Country Day School and Central High School where he excelled academically. His uncle exposed him to socialism through the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. Noam visited left-wing bookstores in New York City and read political literature voraciously. He wrote his first article about the 1939 fall of Barcelona at age 10.
The Linguistic Revolution
Chomsky began studying at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 at age 16. He explored philosophy logic and languages while developing an interest in Arabic. Zellig Harris introduced Chomsky to theoretical linguistics during a political circle meeting in 1947. Harris convinced Chomsky to major in the subject instead of moving to a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine. Chomsky received his master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951 with a thesis published as a book. He became a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University from 1951 to 1955. Chomsky submitted his doctoral dissertation on transformational grammar in 1955 and earned his doctorate that year. The work was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm before publication in 1975. He began teaching at MIT in 1955 after Morris Halle secured him an assistant professor position. His landmark work Syntactic Structures emerged in 1957 and revolutionized the scientific study of language. The text challenged behaviorist psychology which viewed speech as entirely learned through environmental interaction. Chomsky argued that human creativity played a larger role than external conditions in learning language. He founded MIT's graduate program in linguistics with Morris Halle in the late 1950s.