“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” – Noam Chomsky
But what exactly did Chomsky mean here? How can “colorless” and “green” possibly go together? And how can any idea “sleep furiously”? This sentence sounds completely illogical and unnatural. Even though it is grammatically correct, semantically it is paradoxical and incoherent. In this way, Noam Chomsky demonstrates to us the subtle differences between the structures of language and meaning.
Language is never just a collection of words. It is a complex design of human thought, experience, and social context. In this sentence, for example, the words themselves are fine, but their connections create debate and questions in our minds. It is because of this unspoken energy that language evolves; over time and context, both words and meanings gradually change.
Normally, if we seek the root or etymology of any word over centuries, we see the meaning stays the same but the form, pronunciation, and usage have changed. These subtle changes in language occur so slowly that we often do not notice them. But for linguists, these are silent documents of human history’s evolution.
Language is not only a tool of communication; it is a living map of human thought, culture, and social history. Over time, languages evolve, words change, pronunciation shifts, meanings transform, and even the rules of sentence structure can change. Linguistics provides a scientific analysis of these changes.
In the case of the Bangla language, there is likewise a long history of change. Linguist Dr. Muhammad Shahidullah demonstrated that the origins and evolution of Bangla lie in the continuity of Indo-Aryan languages. His research showed how, over centuries, the form of the language changed along with social, political, and cultural shifts. Similarly, linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterjee’s detailed analysis of the phonetic and lexical evolution of Bangla showed language as a continuous process, never stationary.
The Perspective of Ancient Grammar: Panini
In terms of analyzing language in a systematic and scientific way, the ancient Indian grammarian Panini is an incomparable name. Written in the 4th century BCE, his work Ashtadhyayi represents one of the most sophisticated grammatical analyses in human history. Panini analyzed language through a myriad of rules and formulas.
From his work, we find an important idea: language is not chaotic; rather, it embodies deep structural rules within.
Ferdinand de Saussure is another significant theorist of modern linguistics. He viewed language as a system of signs.
According to him, every linguistic sign has two parts—
Signifier — the word or sound
Signified — the concept behind the word
This relationship is not inherent; it is the result of social convention.
Sometimes, changes in language feel like experiments in physics. For example, take Schrödinger’s cat—a cat exists in a state of both life and death until we observe it.
Similarly, in language, a word can have multiple possible meanings. The context determines which meaning becomes fixed.
If we compare language to a city, then words are its buildings, while grammar forms its streets and layout. Though everything may seem chaotic from the outside, an invisible structure operates within.
This concept of an invisible structure was later reinterpreted in modern linguistics by Noam Chomsky.
Generative Grammar: Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky revolutionized modern linguistics. According to his theory of Generative Grammar, the ability to learn language is innate in the human brain.
One of Chomsky’s famous statements is—
“Language is a mirror of mind.”— Noam Chomsky
That is, language reflects the human mind.
He also gave another famous example:
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
This sentence is grammatically correct but semantically odd. With this, Chomsky wanted to show that the grammatical structure and semantic structure of language are two different layers.
According to Chomsky, the ability to learn language is naturally present in the human brain. The speed and spontaneity with which children acquire language support this idea. He once said—
“The fact that all normal children acquire language so rapidly and effortlessly suggests that humans are somehow specially designed to do this.”
— Noam Chomsky
In other words, almost all normal children learn language quickly and easily, which suggests that there is a kind of special biological ability in the human brain for language learning.
The Evolution of Language: A Kind of Scientific Experiment
Sometimes, changes in language feel like experiments in physics. For example, think of Schrödinger’s cat—a cat that exists in a state of both life and death until we observe it.
In language, too, a word often carries several possible meanings. Context or situation specifies which meaning will manifest. From this idea emerges quantum linguistics, where language is analyzed through the multidimensional structures of probability, context, and meaning.
Based on this concept, we can imagine a Quantum Linguistics Pipeline, where language is analyzed on three levels:
1. Phonetic and grammatical structure
2. Contextual probable meanings
3. Social and psychological explanations
In this perspective, a conceptual statement could be—
“Language is not a fixed structure; it behaves like a probability field where meanings collapse through context.”
— Maneesha Rani Biswas
Another idea:
“In quantum linguistics, a word is never completely silent; it carries latent meanings waiting to be observed.”
— Maneesha Rani Biswas
The evolution of the Bangla language further animates this line of thought. From ancient Bangla to medieval, modern, and contemporary Bangla, gradual changes in sound, word formation, grammar, and meaning prove that language is a living system. Over a thousand years, Bangla has endured the influence of foreign words and cultures while finding its own unique form. The research of Shahidullah and Suniti Kumar has shown that Bangla’s pronunciation, semantics, and sentence structure have all adapted according to social and cultural contexts. Due to modern technology, online media, and social communication, these changes are now happening even faster and in more dimensions.
In modern grammatical analysis of the Bangla language, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a significant framework. This theoretical structure plays a key role in understanding the flexibility of Bangla sentence construction.
This evolution proves that language is not just a medium of communication, but is also a reflection of human thoughts and society over time. Language is a moving universe. Language is never still. It is like a river—its course changes over time, new words are added, old words disappear, and within meaning, new possibilities arise.
From Panini’s grammar to Saussure’s semiotics, Chomsky’s generative grammar to modern quantum linguistics—all these theories, in their own ways, lead us to the same truth: language is a living system.
Just as people change with time, language changes too. And reading the history of these changes in language is to read the history of human thought and civilization.
Perhaps future linguistics will observe in even more depth—a word is not just a word; it is a universe of possible meanings that reveals itself gradually through the observation of context.
Maneesha Rani Biswas
Department of Linguistics, University of Dhaka.
Research Coordinator, Dhaka University Research Parliament.
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