In Arrival, Noam Chomsky's Visiting Martian Gets Hollywood Treatment

A big Hollywood release this week is Arrival with Amy Banks as a linguist seeking to establish peaceful contact with visiting aliens. It looks terrific, and made me think too of Tom Wolfe's amusing sendup of Noam Chomsky and his "visiting Martian." What's the visiting Martian? From Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech:

There were six thousand or seven thousand languages in the world, which made people believe that language was a babbling Babel of biblical proportions.

That was where Chomsky's son-t...