Re: Noam Chomsky born (7/12/1928)

On 12/8/2024 3:02 AM, Ross Clark wrote:

Apparently he has been living in Brazil since last year.
(His second wife is Brazilian.)

"In 2023, Chomsky suffered a massive stroke and was flown to a hospital
in São Paulo, Brazil, to recuperate. He can no longer walk or
communicate, making his return to public life improbable, but he
continues to follow current events such as the Israel–Hamas war. He was
discharged in June 2024 to continue his recovery at home. The same
month, Chomsky trended on social media amid false reports of his death.
Periodicals retracted premature obituaries."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
(where there is much more)

I interacted with several MIT folks who worked with and around Chomsky
in the 1960s and 1970s though I never met him. I formed a few
impressions that were favorable. The first was that he provided several
theories about the origins of language and the development of its
structure in enough detail that one could criticize the ideas and, in so
doing, learn things whether or not his original speculations were
completely correct or not.

The second was his work in formal language theory: the identification of
relative powers of representations. (In computer science, the hierarchy
from finite state to touring machines.) This work led to computer tools
that allowed various grammars to describe languages and either attempt
recognition or generation. I believe that these tools brought a new
wrinkle into linguistics: You got a theory, show me your grammar and
I'll quickly generate a few thousand examples and see if they all ring true.

All in all, the above brought a degree of science to linguistics that
hadn't been there before because practitioners were now asked to provide
at least partially testable theories. This supposedly deprecated the
artistic flare that linguists brought to the field but I don't think
that was the case. Rather, it eliminated a substantial amount of bull
shit that was foist by reputation rather than testing.

Not being a linguist myself, I may hold beliefs that are counter to your
more informed opinions. In part these opinions came from seeing the "MAC
hackers" coding up some professors' linguistics publications and
generating raucous nonsense with the code. Of course you'd hear horse
laughs all through the AI lab.
--
Jeff Barnett