Quotes About Language

The trouble with dictionaries is, they tell you more about words than you want to know without answering the question you have.

I understand why people went nuts for 'The Artist.' We use words so much, it's nice to be able to explore a different way of communication, to be able to express silently what someone - or something - is thinking or feeling.

Las palabras son hijas de la carne y como tales se pudren si se las guarda encerradas.

Habrá palabras nuevas para la nueva historia y es preciso encontrarlas antes de que sea tarde.

When the Greek translation of the Pentateuch was made, /Ä¢/ was still a distinct phoneme, but when the remaining books were translated, it may no longer have been pronounced, surviving exclusively in public reading of the Bible before finally disappearing completely.

H. Bauer ... was already arguing that some elements of Hebrew, such as the consecutive tenses, had a close relationship with Akkadian.

The Proto-Canaanite ... seems to have employed 27 different characters. The Ugaritic alphabet from around the 14th century BCE uses 30 characters ... Phoenician had by the 12th century BCE already dropped five characters ... 22 consonantal phonemes.

The Tiberian system became more and more dominant until it completely ousted its Palestino-Tiberian counterpart around the middle of the fourteenth century.

before the tenth century Hebrew writing, like Phoenician, was purely consonantal, and it was halfway though the ninth century BCE, under the influence of Aramaic.

Palmyrene and Nabataean dialects, which use an Aramaic script ... in the opinion of some experts might really be dialects of Arabic.

Sumerian substratum is obvious not only in the use of a cuneiform system of writing, but also in the weakness of Laryngeal and Pharyngeal consonants in Akkadian

The earliest inscriptions in Hebrew date from the tenth BCE.

The oldest Phoenician inscriptions date from around 1100 BCE.

Hebrew ... linguistic development was far from uniform. Even though they share a number of common tendencies, a variety of Hebrew traditions is seen to have co-existed during this period.

According to some scholars, after 1400 BCE ... Ya'udic and Aramaic separated from ... Canaanite group.

It is noticeable that the Phoenician terms are often shared with Ugaritic.

Expressions used almost exclusively in poetry ... tend to be concentrated in the oldest biblical texts. Generally, it may be said that these items existed during the archaic period of the language, later disappearing from normal use.

The inscription of King Mar'alqais , found south of Damascus and dated at 328 CE, is usually said to be the first document in Arabic.

Thus, 'Proto-Semitic' is more a postulate or linguistic convention than an actual ancient language spoken by a recognizable group.

The Proto-Semitic phonological system contains perhaps twenty-nine consonantal phonemes, which despite certain modifications have been conserved with great fidelity in languages like Arabic.

The Babylonian system of accents is similar to the Tiberian, with small variations.

The Pharisees deliberately avoided the Late form of Biblical Hebrew (LBH), which is the language of the Bible written after the exile, presenting their teaching in the language of the spoken vernacular.

In addition to recording the actual changes in language ... the Masoretic pointing system also reflects the linguistic views of the Masoretes in a variety of ways, with evidence of Aramaic influence and of unduly subjective construction.