{"id":319,"date":"2011-06-05T01:04:23","date_gmt":"2011-06-05T01:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/?p=319"},"modified":"2011-06-07T08:58:50","modified_gmt":"2011-06-07T08:58:50","slug":"meeting-with-noam-chomsky-on-may-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/2011\/06\/05\/meeting-with-noam-chomsky-on-may-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting with Noam Chomsky on May 25"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I corresponded with Noam Chomsky about five years ago frequently and started up the conversation again over the last few months. We had never had the occasion to meet in person, but on my recent visit to MIT as part of the larger effort to promote global collaboration in technology convergence I managed to meet him at his office. Here is a picture which includes also my close friend Eugene Pak of Seoul National University’s AICT (Advanced Institutes of Convergence Technology). A fourth member of the group is Bertrand Russell,\u00a0logician, \u00a0political activist and author of “Has Man a Future.” I read that book as a child when I found it in the library of my aunt Jeanne in Luxembourg. Clearly Noam has him included in all portraits taken to indicate the spirit behind what he is doing today.<\/p>\n

Interesting, the Wikipedia biography for Bertrand Russell has no mention of Noam Chomsky.<\/p>\n

We talked primarily about my forthcoming book: “The Observable Mundane: The Reception of Chinese Vernacular Narrative in Edo Japan.” In this book I argue that there was no concept of a “vernacular” language that could be observed, analyzed and employed in literary production before the exposure of Japanese intellectuals to Chinese vernacular narratives and writings by Chinese intellectuals on vernacular narrative \u00a0in the 17th century. These Chinese vernacular texts \u00a0had the full authority of the great Chinese intellectual tradition for readers, but they included new linguistic registers and treated subjects that were beyond the previous range of literary discourse.<\/p>\n

Noam stated that within the field of linguistics as practiced in the West even as recently as the 1970s there was much resistance to the serious consideration of linguistic phenomena in vernaculars. The complexity of all language has been obscured, he suggested, by the\u00a0privileged\u00a0status of certain forms of discourse. \u00a0I did not start out my research on the reception of vernacular Japanese narrative back in 1992 with any thought about Noam’s universal grammar. \u00a0But there is some affinity between the idea of “an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans” and a reconsideration of the value of the lower registers of linguistic discourse.<\/p>\n

I think that because I received a C at Yale in a course in linguistics that was rather poorly taught, I had an allergy to linguistics as a field for the last twenty five years. \u00a0So I ended up a professor of literature interested in a linguistic phenomenon.<\/p>\n

I tried to convince Noam to visit Korea, telling him how important a country it has become. But he was not convinced. He did note, however, that his grandchildren have a great interest in Korean popular culture, suggesting the Korean wave is sweeping even the United States.<\/p>\n

[twitter-follow screen_name=’epastreich’]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I corresponded with Noam Chomsky about five years ago frequently and started up the conversation again over the last few months. We had never had the occasion to meet in person, but on my recent visit to MIT as part of the larger effort to promote global collaboration in technology convergence I managed to meet … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9296425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1831212],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature-and-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9296425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}