Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky dies at age 95 | Hacker News Reader

Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky dies at age 95

www-diariodocentrodomundo-com-br.translate.goog

35 pointsmarcodiego19 comments

He hasn't died: https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/wireStory/noam-chomskys-wife-r...

It will never cease to amaze me that he is the creator of Chomsky heirarchy of Grammars that I learned in university, and I can go to youtube to find him talking about how each American president would be guilty of violating the Geneva Convention.

The contribution of the Chomsky hierarchy to computer science is highly significant. It had a big personal impact when I was learning about compilers and parsing.

Any remembrance is going to keep getting flagged off of HN because of his other activities, though.

I think the flags have more been because of the poor sourcing of the actual death. It seems various people and groups heard that he died and are posting their obituaries and remembrances, but there's no real factual confirmation or details (e.g. one thing that was briefly on the front page here [1] was a link to an unsourced, now-deleted tweet from Momentum UK).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40721271

Which activities did you have in mind?

Endorsing Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge for one

I learned only much later, years after earning a B.A. in linguistics, that Chomsky was much more renowned for being a political pundit and philosopher than he was for conceiving of X-bar theory and so forth.

I had thought at first that it was just a coincidence that this fellow talking about politics had the same name as the famous linguist.. but it's not that common a name.

I wonder why exactly this is posted as a google translation of a portuguese article.

Is it perhaps a play on the work done by Chomsky in algorithmical syntactical language analysis, and how it relates to the modern Deep Learning advancedments in the form of automated Translation?

AFAICS, DCM (the source) was the first to publish the confirmation clearly.

>I wonder why exactly this is posted as a google translation of a portuguese article.

He was/is hospitalized in Brazil.

the link also contains no content whatsoever. there is no article, only links to other parts of the website

Also, his wife is Brazilian and he is hospitalized in Brazil.

posted 40 min ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720876

Yes, this article doesn't appear to have any independent sourcing, it just cites the Jacobin one that you link: "de acordo com a revista norte-americana Jacobin" ("according to the North American magazine Jacobin").

The New Statesman also published an obituary that they had to retract.

I found the title of this article amusing although the publication isn't one that I often read: "'Manufacturing Obituaries': Media Falsely Reports Noam Chomsky's Death" https://www.commondreams.org/news/noam-chomsky-not-dead

Of all the great stuff he wrote, the one that sticks in my mind the most is "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fu...

A great loss. R.I.P. Dr Chomsky

I remember emailing him once while at MIT to invite him for a dinner series that I was hosting back in the 2010s. He couldn’t attend but sent a long and beautiful reply.

Remarkable, how approachable he was for being such as a hallowed figure.

RIP!

He is very approachable by email. I have heard this from other people. He even wrote back to an email from my horrible step-mother. (My father and Noam were in the same Hebrew classes taught over multiple years by Noam's mother in Philadelphia. Noam was a good student or so my father told me.)

*I'm not humble bragging, nor passively-aggressively diminishing that Chomsky replied at length to your invitation. I have heard that he was accessible by email to many. I have rarely if ever heard that he wrote ANYONE a long and beautiful reply. As you said, that is remarkable. Also, he is still alive as of 20 June 2024.

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