Noam Chomsky Any Good with Language?

In the first thread above, Chomsky is simply saying that the argument is over who first thought of email, not over how the word is written (upper case, lower case or hyphenated). Given the quick pace of evolution of language now, this should not be surprising. A word which is a blend of two words used to take decades, perhaps centuries, before it took its final structure. Not anymore, as is clear from this example of "email" above. Otherwise the historical procedure of introducing a blend used to follow these lines : Take these two words,"home" and "work", for example, and put them side by side (home work) to mean "school work done at home". At a later period, perhaps decades, you will see the word hyphenated (home-work) to indicate that the two words now form a unit of meaning. Still later you will see that the hyphen disappears, and the two words are joined together (homework). Pronunciation also changes; the first syllable is now stressed.

The man in whose favor Chomsky is arguing is the "inventor" of email if, by a similar argument, Chomsky can make Steve Jobs the inventor of the I-Pad. Email is a development of what was known as "interoffice" communication. It could be that Chomsky's man came up with the name, email. This should be "coinage", not invention. And, speaking of inventions, all Chomsky's work in Linguistics is a development of the work of linguists before him like Otto Jespersen, Henry Sweet and others.