Chomsky's language background

[Laada Bilaniuk]

>From a filmed interview Chomsky did when he was a guest lecturer here at UW
in 1989 (taken from the transcript), it certainly doesn't seem as if he saw
his language background as homogeneous:

"So take me--my father spoke with a Ukrainian accent and my mother spoke
with a mixed New York-Lithuanian accent, and I spoke Urban Philadelphia
because that's what the kids were talking in the streets.  And undoubtedly,
if you really took my speech patterns and so on aside, you'd find influences
from the parents and uncles and so on."

As someone has already mentioned, it depends on how you define
"monolingual"...

Laada

--
Laada Bilaniuk
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Washington
Box 353100/Denny Hall M32
Seattle, WA 98195-3100


----------
>From: "Harold F. Schiffman" <haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
>To: Gabriella Modan <modan.1 at osu.edu>
>Cc: Ronald Kephart <rkephart at unf.edu>, <linganth at cc.rochester.edu>
>Subject: Re: linguistic questions
>Date: Fri, Apr 18, 2003, 1:21 PM
>

> In a recent issue of the New Yorker there is an article about Chomsky, and
> it says that a great deal was known about Hebrew in his family, but no
> mention of Yiddish is mentioned.  (New Yorker Mar. 31, 2003, pg 64-ff.)
>
>  One quote: " While the boys were growing up, William Chomsky [his
> father] became well-known as a Hebrew scholar; in 1957, he published what
> became a classic history: "Hebrew, the Eternal Language." (p. 68).  Both
> his parents trained as Hebrew teachers and "cared a great deal about
> promoting Hebrew as a living language." (p. 68)  "Although the family
> spoke English at home, Noam and David became fluent in Hebrew when they
> were young." (ibid.) The article goes on to document the ways Chomsky
> learned and used Hebrew, e.g. in summer camps.
>
> Hal Schiffman
>
>
>
>  On Fri, 18 Apr 2003, Gabriella Modan wrote:
>
>> Chomsky's dissertation was on the morpho-phonemics of modern Hebrew, and
>> I'm pretty sure he's done work on and/or speaks Yiddish.  Regardless of his
>> bi/multilingualism (which it's worth pointing out that we don't even know
>> if we're working with similar definitions of bilingualism), it's patently
>> ridiculous to claim that Chomsky has nothing of interest to say about
language.
>>
>> I'm interested in these discussions about who is a linguist and who is
>> not.  I would argue that people who are good at learning languages as
>> adults can be seen as linguists  in some sense, because they have to go
>> through the same kinds of explicit structural and pragmatic analyses as the
>> people who do it for a living in the process of becoming competent
>> speakers/signers/writers.  So what makes a linguist a linguist?  Getting
>> paid for it?  And what's at stake for us in who we allow into the
>> definition?  I've been noticing for the last few years that this issue
>> always seems to be brewing beneath the surface of the annual Society for
>> Linguistic Anthropology meetings, where people, depending on the year and
>> on the issue, want to either separate Linguistic Anthropology from
>> Linguistics, which seems to serve the purpose of bolstering credentials as
>> anthropologists, or to emphasize Linguistc Anthropologists' identity as
>> linguists (this played out last year in the discussion about whether or not
>> the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages was gonna meet with AAA
>> or LSA); promoting an identity as linguists *also* seems to work to bolster
>> our credentials vis-a-vis the rest of anthropology, as people who have
>> difficult technical skills which are critical to the work of anthropology
>> (something along the lines of, you need us, otherwise anthropology will
>> have no rigor, so we're worthy of respect).  This stuff also often seems
>> somehow to segue from or into how many linguistic anthropologists are on
>> various AAA committees.  In light of this, I would be interested to hear
>> other people's thoughts on how our definitions of "linguist" tie into
>> material concerns, and what the implications of that are for the work of
>> linguistic anthropology (and linguistic anthropologists, broadly construed).
>>
>> Galey Modan
>>
>> At 10:16 AM 4/18/2003 -0400, Ronald Kephart wrote:
>> >At 6:02 PM -0400 4/17/03, hmfaller at umich.edu wrote:
>> >
>> >>And thank goodness my invocation of snot caused such a flurry of
>> >>activity. I actually was thinking about Jakobson in comparison to Chomsky
>> >>(for all his good politics)...
>> >
>> >But didn't Chomsky grow up speaking both English and Hebrew? As I
>> >understand it, his parents were both involved in the movement to
>> >revitalize Hebrew, his father was a respected scholar of Hebrew, and
>> >Chomsky himself taught Hebrew as a young fellow and wrote his masters
>> >thesis on Hebrew. So I think it's a bit unfair to claim Chomsky as
>> >"monolingual," whatever else you might think of him.
>> >
>> >And, while I'm here, I also disagree with whoever stated that all people
>> >who have language are linguists. I do agree that people have what I would
>> >call folk theories of language, and also culture, and probably even
>> >digestion. But I don't think that makes them linguists, or cultural
>> >anthropologists, or gastroenterologists.
>> >
>> >Hiding under my desk now...
>> >
>> >Ron
>> >
>> >--
>> >Ronald Kephart
>> >Associate Professor
>> >English & Foreign Languages
>> >University of North Florida
>> >http://www.unf.edu/~rkephart
>>
>>
>