“That’s not true, he’s fine.” It is with these words that Valeria Chomsky, the wife of the American linguist Noam Chomsky, formally denied the death of her husband. One of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, left a hospital in Sao Paulo on Tuesday June 18 and will continue his “treatment” at homeAFP learned from the hospital, denying false rumors about his death that had circulated on the internet.
The Beneficência Portuguesa de Sao Paulo indicated in a medical bulletin sent to AFP that “patient Avran Noam Chomsky released from hospital to continue his treatment at home”, without further details. The hospital press release was released after the appearance on social networks unsourced information on the death of the 95-year-old intellectual.
According to the newspaper Folha from Sao Paulo, Noam Chomsky was hospitalized in the Brazilian city after suffering a stroke in June last year that affected the right side of his body. Valeria Chomsky is Brazilian and the couple owns a residence since 2015 in the city.
A central figure for his role as a committed intellectual
Considered the founder of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky stated in his work Syntactic Structures (1957) that language is an innate faculty and that a “generative grammar”, a set of universal rules of language, is inscribed in the human brain.
But he has become a central figure of the 20th and 21st centuries above all for his role as a committed intellectual, in his radical criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and Israel, as well as of the media. This opponent of the Vietnam War and the American invasion of Iraq also got closer to Latin American left-wing leaders such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the current Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
For many years, Noam Chomsky was member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Arizona.
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