Chomsky

Chomsky always had a talent for learning, or at least a fierce interest in learning about everything he got his talons on. He would keep nagging his teachers with all kind of questions to the point even they could only shake their heads and refer him to the library’s many books of knowledge. It was common to find the young imperial buried in texts and scrolls, hidden away in a reading hole for days.

To be perfectly honest, for a long time Chomsky wasn’t very interested in any kind of language. He even found his own quite boring, partly because his reason for being an academic was not to study himself, but to study that which was beyond him. Then, during another of his knowledge chases, the stumbled into a section of the library he never had been to before. Some of those books seemed to be quite old, and yet others must have joined the collection only for a little while. After pulling out some of them Chomsky noticed, that none of them were written in Common Draconic and still needed to be translated. Although he was able to read some parts of the scripts, others were nearly impossible to understand. It was right then he became interested in linguistics. Thenceforth, the young dragon would always search for more texts about language and literature; and the more he read the deeper he fell in love with both.

At one point he recogniced, that the written records only reveal so much about all linguistic usage--that being grammatical, syntactic and lexical properties. He was missing out on phonology and the subtleties of interdragonal communication. So, the linguist in him wanted to encounter as many varieties as possible, to the extent that he could handle the phonology, the basic grammar, and little differences in their use. For that he'd follow the clans merchants and travelers to the big Crossroad or Trading Posts. Chomsky then would sit with dragons from different flights and breeds for hours, just to have a conversation with them. His task was to learn as much about the language as possible in the time available. As the young dragon has a gift for languages he was able to acquire remarkable much by using those field linguistic techniques. After he'd encounterd a diversity of dragons from all flights for many months, we was actually able to carry on a basic conversation, immitating their breed and flight's varieties quite well.

The current focus of his research still lies on 'variations'. Therefore, Chomsky made himself comfortable in the Whispering Hall at the Inn and at the Gathering Point, listening to and chatting with travelers from all over Sornieth.

Today, the Imperial also took on a task of teaching hatchlings and dragons about the written word. Young hatchlings and dragons are being sent to him for learning the ropes of Common Draconic. At the same time, Chomsky is the best translator the clan has. They always call him over to consult and translate during meetings that involve meeting with dragons from allied clans from all over Sornieth.

As an applied linguist, Chomsky just hopes his work in applied linguistics, educational linguistics, variational linguistics, and ethnolinguistics would have some sort of lasting impact, but one’ll have to ask others about that.