Quotes About Semantics

Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

I don't use the word 'renaissance'. It's flawed because in Latin, it's tied to the rebirth of Christ... It's a word that's tied to a European concept.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.

let's get our semantics straight. Story does not equal fiction, much less "lies." It's the world we Christians inhabit as "people of the Book." We are story people. All

Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.

After a while she said, If you make a sound it's just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it's a word. It means something. It can't not mean something.

There is something real signified by that word 'just' that proper language won't acknowledge. It's a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

like textual glossolalia.

Words change meaning over time, and often in unpredictable ways. Queen Anne is said (probably apocryphally) to have commented about Sir Christopher Wren's architecture at St. Paul's Cathedral that it was awful, artificial, and amusing—by which she meant that it was awe-inspiring, highly artistic, and thought-provoking.

Every word is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered.

Het verschil tussen loonarbeid en slavernij is een semantische kwestie

our human language is full of indications of how much dogs mean to us.somebody who is not favored to win is anunderdog a book that's well worn is dog-eared and why is a bitch the most humiliating thing you can call a woman?

The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.

Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does.

To utter a word and meaning nothing by it is unworthy of a philosopher. Berkeley

there is a radical underdetermination of what is said by the literal meaning of the sentence. There is nothing in the literal meaning of the sentence "She gave him her key and he opened the door" to block the interpretation, He opened the door with her key by bashing the door down with the key; the key weighed two hundred pounds and was in the shape of an axe. Or, He swallowed both the door and the key and he inserted the key in the lock by the peristaltic contraction of his gut.

The best objects to think with are words, because that is part of what words are for. Indeed, it is a condition for something to be a word that it be thinkable. But

nothing in the literal meaning of those sentences blocks those wrong interpretations. In each case we understand the verb differently, even though its literal meaning is constant, because in each case our interpretation depends on our Background abilities.

This leads to the consideration of a third great division of names, into connotative and non-connotative, the latter sometimes, but improperly, called absolute.

The second general division of names is into concrete and abstract. A concrete name is a name which stands for a thing; an abstract name is a name which stands for an attribute of a thing.

Names have been further distinguished into univocal and æquivocal: these, however, are not two kinds of names, but two different modes of employing names.

This, however, only shows that there is an ambiguity in the word is; a word which not only performs the function of the copula in affirmations, but has also a meaning of its own, in virtue of which it may itself be made the predicate of a proposition.