A few minutes of respite from the workday of a linguist:
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This entry was posted by fintel on Friday, April 21st, 2006, at 10:52 am.
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A weblog on semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and intersections thereof
A few minutes of respite from the workday of a linguist:
This entry was posted by fintel on Friday, April 21st, 2006, at 10:52 am.
Subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed for all comments to this post.
Well,
[1] After Noam Chomsky became ‘Norman’, and the confusion between bi-sexual and bi-lingual, I think that the failure of the universal educational system may be more worrisome than we have ever suspected.
[2] Noam Chomsky is really a humble individual and a good teacher, for he has great patience with People who want to learn more and yet do not know much.
[3] The interview is an interesting empirical material because it provides a good sample of dialectal variation and so we are able to analyse a different variety of English. Unfortunately, some People, without much background in Modern Linguistics or with strong Philological and Normative influences, still believe in homogeneity and, when confronted with actual language data and undeniable proofs against homogeneity, say some odd things like ‘Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese are two languages’ etc. This interview is good for it shows to linguists in preparation (undergraduates, for instance) that English also displays a great dialectal variety, perhaps greater than the variation between Colloquial Brazilian varieties of Portuguese, which have been the main target of Tarallo’s work, and the Standard Written European Dialect that is described by Raposo.
April 21st, 2006, at 11:39 am #Tony,
Ali G is a fictional character (from an HBO show) who conducts mock interviews with famous people, without them realizing that a joke is being played on them. There’s some more to be read about this at LanguageLog.
April 21st, 2006, at 12:15 pm #Well, I was not aware of that, as you have rightly guessed. But having read preposterous things certain (supposedly high educated) blog writers are able to say about issues they virtually know nothing about, and having witnessed nonsensical things Presidents of important Countries are able to affirm and carry out, nowadays I suspect a character like Ali G does not sound fictional. What can be said of a scholar who, for instance, takes Ronald Reagan or Ernesto Geisel seriously (describing them as great statesmen or eloquent orators) or keeps Margaret Thatcher or her friend Pinochet in high regard? They are not distant of the character Ali G and unfortunately have too much room to say those things, without any sense of shame and unwilling to revise their misinformation. German and Russian scholars, for instance, are not ‘allowed’ to do the same about the Kaisers and the Czars or about Hitler, Drexler, Rasputin and Stalin, without being ridiculed by a vaster and much critical audience.
Noam Chomsky does not deserve to be treated in that manner. Chomsky’s persistent efforts against mediocrity of the self-proclaimed intelligentsia and against mass media misinformation techniques should be reckoned by no less than a Nobel prize and deep respect from all of us, including tv actors.
April 21st, 2006, at 2:25 pm #PS:
April 21st, 2006, at 2:35 pm #Of course, your efforts to teach Semantics to broader audiences through the internet are of utmost importance as well, and your blog is an Oasis of serious Linguistics in the Web, wherefrom you set an crucial example to our colleagues.