[Captainpaintball]

F'n Noam Chomsky is a linguist. That's all I need to know about their kind. And if I hear one more stupid kollege white boy 'axe' "Where you at?" one more time...

[durasell]

Language will do what it's always done -- change and serve to differentiate the classes.

[Question_Assumptions]

And if I hear one more stupid kollege white boy 'axe' "Where you at?" one more time...

Just so you know, stupid white boys have been say aks for ask for, oh, at least 600 years ("I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housband to the Samaritan?" -- Chaucer, 1386) and probably back well into Old English (as "acsian") for over 1,000 years. It was considered good literary English as late as 1535 ("Axe & it shall be given you." -- Matthew 7:7 in the Cloverdale Bible).

I'm sorry but I'm with the "liberal linguists" on this one. Languages change over time. The question is how much voice recordings will act to push back that change.

[SAJ]

Chomsky has been mislabelled for decades; he is NOT, nor ever has been, a ''linguist''; he was a pioneer in ''linguistics'', a discipline that **originally** and traditionally dealt with the study of the organisation of language.

A 'linguist', by definition, understands and uses the structure of X number of languages, presumably with a view toward furthering communication between speakers/writers of languages A and B. Or, perhaps, engages in other worthwhile endeavours, for example, translation of either historical documents or the straightforward translation from language to language in order to facilitate communication in the 'real' world. These aren't any part of Chomsky's CV, even though he is fluent in 5 (6?, sorry, can't recall just now) languages.

Chomsky's academic expertise, as published, deals with what are called ''formal grammars'', and has been quite useful in the development of computer languages -- a result, btw, that he did NOT anticipate. Chomsky, at his early best, was to language what Bertrand Russell was, at his early best, to formal logic.

I won't waste your time recounting the subsequent and unfortunate history of these two gents' psychopathy after they abandoned their respective fields of expertise, and at some point decided to make a subsidiary career by telling the rest of the world how to live.

Their wildly misplaced assumptions about their competence, and their subsequent insistence about expertising upon social and political issues resembles very strongly the similar phenomenon we see today of some number of alleged actors named Baldwin, as well as the occasional Streisand, who offer similar, although far, far less coherent, ''expertise''.