In 1975, Jerry Fodor, a linguist/philosopher close to Noam Chomsky, published his highly influential book The Language of Thought. Here we find the ancient and medieval idea of a lingua mentis in a new wrapping, incidentally without any reference to earlier sources. Indeed it seems almost to have been a complete reinvention. In this book, Fodor pursues the idea that even very young children, before they acquire the natural language spoken in their environment, already possess a language, namely this language of thought, now sometimes also called mentalese. There must be a language of thought, he argues, because ‘you cannot learn a language whose terms express semantic properties not expressed by the terms of some language you are already able to use’ (Fodor 1975: 61). As this is true and accepted for learning a second language, it must also hold for the first (external) language. People are born with an innate language, a mentalese which is universal, i.e. the same for everyone regardless of their ethnic origin. When we speak, we actually formulate an utterance in the language of thought which we subsequently translate into the language we have acquired, in order to communicate: ‘English has no semantics. Learning English isn't learning a theory about what its sentences mean. It's learning to associate its sentences with the corresponding thoughts’ (Fodor 1998: 9, Fodor's emphasis). for Fodor, natural language words are secondary, and mental concepts are primary.