Noam Chomsky born (7/12/1928)

[Ross Clark]

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)

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

Post by Ross Clark
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 met Chomsky once, if you can call it that. I was staying for two
weeks in the Certosa di Pontignano for a collaboration with someone in
Siena. For the first week I was alone, and for dinner they seated me at
a large table by myself. For the second week my wife and dughter joined
me, and we sat at the same table. There was a linguistics conference
arranged at the Certosa for a couple of days. During dinner an elderly
man arrived and was put at the other end of the same table. Our
conversation didn't extend beyond things like "Would you be kind enough
to pass the salt, please." He left before we did, and someone sitting
at one of the smaller tables where they put the rank and file at the
conference said "Do you know who that was?" After I said no he said it
was Chomsky. I'm not sure what I might have said to him if I'd known
who he was.

[HenHanna]

Post by Athel Cornish-Bowden

Post by Ross Clark
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)

When was this?

Post by Athel Cornish-Bowden
I met Chomsky once, if you can call it that. I was staying for two
weeks in the Certosa di Pontignano for a collaboration with someone in
Siena. For the first week I was alone, and for dinner they seated me at
a large table by myself. For the second week my wife and dughter joined
me, and we sat at the same table. There was a linguistics conference
arranged at the Certosa for a couple of days. During dinner an elderly
man arrived and was put at the other end of the same table. Our
conversation didn't extend beyond things like "Would you be kind enough
to pass the salt, please." He left before we did, and someone sitting
at one of the smaller tables where they put the rank and file at the
conference said "Do you know who that was?" After I said no he said it
was Chomsky. I'm not sure what I might have said to him if I'd known
who he was.

Did anyone watch the 90 min (?) documentary about Chomsky that
came out about 10 years ago? ------- (it was lame)


(i liked the film [Manufacturing Consent]) Around that time, i went
to a talk by him.


The book by Tom Wolfe was good... Half of the book was on Chomsky.
------- his early years, His rise to fame.

[Jeff Barnett]

Post by Ross Clark
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 Barn

[Aidan Kehoe]

[...] 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.

And then he was consistently unwilling to accept data that falsified his
theories.

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.

Almost never relevant to conventional languages (because the grammars were
always incomplete), and a dead-end for computer languages. Neither are used
today in anger. Machine translation and large language models use statistical
methods. Compilers that aim to give helpful feedback with compile errors (that
are not toys) need heavy hand-parsing of the input.

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.

As I say, a dead end, his own brand of bullshit.

But he made a good living from the military-industrial complex while loudly
decrying the military-industrial complex. Maybe his underlying motivation was
to waste US taxpayer money.

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.