A review by virtualmima
Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky

2.0

Language exists to articulate what has not yet been thought, guided by the shadowy mental impression that speech aims to illuminate. There is no universal grammar, and nor does there have to be. There are metaphysical sensory abstractions representing ideas which words only exist to describe. Language is a tool that we learn as babies. It doesn't fill in some sort of empty template that we're born with. It's an imperfect and incomplete method that allows us to verbalize abstractions in ways that help us to process them, much as a painter concretizes an image in its mind through paint and brushstrokes. Most of us are bad painters, and likewise, bad philosophers. When we think of a flavor, we aren't thinking of the grammar of that flavor, but the faint memory of the flavor and trying to latch onto it before we forget, by locating which word we can associate with that flavor. The flavor is an experience, and the name of the food is only a lifeless symbol to label the source of that experience. Grammar is only an afterthought.

There may be a universal language, consisting of invisible lines, curves, and colors in your mind's eye as well as textures and timbres of sound that music tries to communicate in its arrangements, and its "grammar" may be a complicated theory governing the use of sound and light and other sensory stimuli to create an experience communicating in each moment ideas that only books can begin to describe, but that theory belongs to aesthetics more than linguistics.