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)
On 2024-12-08 10:02:50 +0000, Ross Clark said:
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.
[...] 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.
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