Quotes About Language

or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).

The earliest preserved examples of the Etruscan and Roman alphabets are also inscriptions on drinking cups and wine containers.

TODAY, PROFESSIONAL LINGUISTS design writing systems for unwritten languages by the method of blueprint copying.

But the line most familiar to European and American readers is the one that led via the Phoenicians to the Greeks by the early eighth century B.C., thence to the Etruscans in the same century, and in the next century to the Romans, whose alphabet with slight modifications is the one used to print this book.

New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.

Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic signs, used in effect for spelling syllables, letters, grammatical elements, or parts of words; and determinatives, which were not pronounced but were used to resolve ambiguities. Nevertheless

Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One

The UCLA historian Christopher Ehret has applied this linguistic approach to determining the sequence in which domestic plants and animals became utilized by the people of each African language family. By a method termed glotto-chronology, based on calculations of how rapidly words tend to change over historical time, comparative linguistics can even yield estimated dates for domestications or crop arrivals.

THE LIMITED USES and users of early writing suggest why writing appeared so late in human evolution.

signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.

If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.)

there are current linguistic reverberations—especially the impending disappearance of most of the modern world's 6,000 surviving languages, becoming replaced by English, Chinese, Russian, and a few other languages whose numbers of speakers have increased enormously in recent centuries.

As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above "barbarians" or "savages.

For instance, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate but most Iraqis are not: why did writing nevertheless arise nearly four thousand years earlier in Iraq?

making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.

Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

You speak baby gibberish?' asked Jack. 'Fluently. The adult-education center ran a course, and I have a lot of time on my hands.' 'So what did he say?' 'I don't know.' 'I thought you said you spoke gibberish?' 'I do. But your baby doesn't. I think he's speaking either pre-toddler nonsense, a form of infact burble or an obscure dialect of gobbledygook. In any event, I can't understand a word he's saying.' 'Oh.

Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.

Words are like leaves,. . .like people really, fond of their own society.

He also thought that 'abbreviation' was too long for its meaning, that 'monosyllabic' should have one syllable, 'dyslexic' should be renamed 'O' and 'unspeakable' should be respelt 'unsfzpxkable.

We're in a psuedoscientific technobabble.

Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index.

They had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands; the air was heav'y with th'em&.