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He did say 'any known' back in the year 1969 though, so judging it to today's knowns would still not be a justification to the idea's age.
Shannon first proposed Markov processes to generate natural language in 1948. That's inadequate for the reasons discussed extensively in this essay, but it seems like a pretty significant hint that methods beyond simply counting n-grams in the corpus could output useful probabilities.
In any case, do you see evidence that Chomsky changed his view? The quote from 2011 ("some successes, but a lot of failures") is softer but still quite negative.