Noam Chomsky in poor health

[lpetrich]

He's still alive, but he's in poor health.
Noam Chomsky health update: Famed intellectual ‘no longer able to talk’ | The Independent - "The 95-year-old famed linguist has not been seen in public since June last year"

Noam Chomsky’s health has deterioriated following a medical event, leaving him unable to communicate, his former assistant has said.

That may explain his silence on the Israel-Hamas War, something that he'd normally be extremely talkative about. "See? I told you so about how bad Israel is."

Noting
Updates on Noam's Health from his long-time MIT assistant, Bev Stohl : r/chomsky - 4 months ago

I've been replying to questions on other people's posts about why Noam Chomsky hasn't been returning emails, or interviewing. I'm grateful for the few of you who suggested that I create my own post. So, here it is.

In a nutshell, Noam is 95 years old and has been out of the public eye since last June, as many have noticed. He has not been writing, corresponding, or interviewing, as his health and wellbeing have taken the majority of his time and energy.

The family is very private ...

and
Media Lens - A Message About Noam Chomsky No doubt like many... | Facebook quoting Bev Stohl from a month ago, also in Reddit?

His ability to speak is complicated by factors I can’t yet disclose. When the relative I’m in touch with visited him a month ago, he did not communicate with her. He is not ambulatory. I’m not sure for how long this will go on. He is not in pain. His eyes are open and he seems to be watching what’s happening around him.

What happened?
Noam Chomsky Suffered a Stroke in 2023 and Is Recovering in Brazil - 11/06/2024 - World - Folha

Of Jewish origin, he lived in a kibbutz in northern Israel in 1953.

Besides being a linguist, Chomsky is a respected international political analyst. Of his more than one hundred books, four are specifically about Israel – its wars, governments, and aggressions against the Palestinian people. Despite hundreds of requests from the world press, he has not analyzed the Hamas attack on October 7 and the destruction of Gaza because he had a massive stroke last June. He has difficulty speaking, and the right side of his body is numb.

Before that stroke, he was very busy, studying, writing, speaking, and traveling to conferences.

 

[Politesse]

Damned sorry to hear it. We have never agreed on everything, but who does? It cannot be denied he has changed the world for the better, and I admire his tireless political advocacy and insistence on asserting the relevance of the academic in public life. A new Socrates for a generation that needed one. I'm glad he lived to see so many of the innovations and discoveries that followed on from his reorientation of linguistic study.

 

[lpetrich]

Noam Chomsky is most noted for his work on the structure of natural language:  Generative grammar especially  Transformational grammar and theories of deep structure.

I recall from somewhere that he came up with his theories by mainly considering features of English. The trouble there is that (natural) languages differ in numerous structural features. For example, in English, adjectives can function as nouns, and that is common in other Indo-European languages, and at least some of Uralic, Turkic, and Semitic ones. But in Japanese and Korean, adjectives are closely related to verbs. To say <to be> <adjective>, you conjugate the adjective like a verb. Like "Let's active" for "Let's be active". WALS Online - Home is the World Atlas of Language Structures - one can find a *lot* of variation, though there are common features and correlations of features like  Greenberg's linguistic universals

So I'm skeptical of such claims of deep structure.

But that's not what gets him the interest that he gets. It's his politics that does that.

He seems to think that the US is the world's only imperialist villain, and while he may have some good critiques of some parts of US foreign policy, he seems like a  Tankie

That label was originally applied to someone who defended the Soviet Union sending in its tanks to suppress the rebellions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. But it was eventually generalized to apologists for authoritarianism and imperialism and nastiness more generally when done by some country or group that opposes the US or US-friendly nations.

 Cambodian genocide denial - mentioning NC as a sort of Cambodian-genocide skeptic, if not an outright denier.
chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website