John McWhorter on Chomsky Debate (vox)

At 85, Tom Wolfe decided there was one more ‘60s icon to take down: Noam Chomsky.

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...According to Chomsky’s revolutionary view, first introduced in the 1950s and early '60s, we need only learn which words our particular language uses for things; the variation in vocabulary is trivial compared with the deep machinery of universal grammar.

One might object that languages seem to differ mightily also in how they put words together, but Chomsky hypothesizes that these differences all come down to a few "switches" that flip in a toddler’s brain. Flip one this way and you get a language where the verb comes at the end of the sentence, flip it that way for languages like English where the verb sits in the middle of the sentence, and so on. Chomsky famously believes that a Martian would see all 7,000 of the world’s languages as a single one — universal grammar — with variations...link