[dgut]

grammar as we know it was devised for the Latin language and linguists spend most of the time attempting to fit other languages into neat boxes that the Latin grammar wasn't designed for. This of course leads to absurdity. Chomsky attempted to solve this problem with his universal grammar, but that too stops working quickly once you get outside of European languages. That is, ignoring linguistic tools is one of the reasons GPT is successful.

[csb6]

> that too stops working quickly once you get outside of European languages

I don’t think this is entirely fair. Generative grammars have been produced for a huge variety of non-European languages, even non-Indo-European languages, and can account for tremendous diversity in linguistic rules. Even languages without fixed word orders or highly synthetic languages can be represented.

Linguistics isn’t focused on the problem of outputting reasonable-sounding text responses. Instead, it seeks to transparently explain how language works and is structured, something that GPT does not do.

[IIAOPSW]

That is not what universal grammar was about. Literally read even the wikipedia page or watch like any lecture on the topic.

[dgut]

What exactly did I write that is wrong? UG argues a universal grammar exists, and that humans innately posses knowledge about this grammar. It's this grammar that enables humans to learn a language (according to UG). They (UG linguists) have created a system of syntax rules that attempts to describe any language, but failed at doing so once they step outside of Indo-European languages. This is partly because Chomsky was hired by MIT to solve machine translation and putting language into a set of neat boxes was his best idea and partly because Chomsky himself had little knowledge of other languages. It's pseudoscience.