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Noam Chomsky, 95, ‘no longer able to talk’ as intellectual’s ‘health deteriorates’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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I am a professional academic linguist, and make no mistake, whether you are a Chomskyan or a Functionalist, Papa Noam (as we used to call him in grad school) is one of the most important figures in the field for the last 100 years. Perhaps the most important. I wish him well and will be sad when he eventually passes.
That's to say nothing of his political endeavors.
If I may ask, what do you do as a professional academic linguist? Sounds like a interesting and niche field.
The more common definition of "linguist" is effectively "translator", i.e. someone who is a native speaker of language X but can also speak language Y. That's also the military definition.
In terms of the study of linguistics, in academia you can have a great many "linguists" who are not translators but are versed in the science of linguistics and can e.g. do grammatical analysis. It's an entirely different skillset from "translator", and in fact, one doesn't need to speak language Y to do it.
So, mostly I'm differentiating myself from the translator-type linguist and saying I'm the linguistics-type linguist. And because I also do that for a living, I added professional.
You sound like a cunning linguist
Are you also a master debater?
Yeah but what exactly does that entail? Studying over old books and figure out how the language has changed?
Think of linguistics as "programming language but for languages".
Is it ones and zeros, or is it more human readable? The differences between those, on an academic level is linguistics.
There is a full wiki article that probably gives a better impression of it than I can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_of_Noam_Chomsky
It's really weird and interesting!
There are a great many languages which are undocumented entirely or are severely lacking in documentation. One part of my job is collecting data for such languages. Another part is more traditional computational linguistics, which in my case is primarily corpus analysis (still a relatively common step in the development of model training data).