Quotes About Language

Similarly, unless you heard them spoken, you might not instantly recognize ajskrym, muving pikceris, and peda as the Polish for ice cream

It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric.

second largest and other similar comparisons often lead writers astray: 'Japan is the second largest drugs market in the world after the United States' (The Times). Not quite. It is the largest drugs market in the world after the United States or it is the second largest drugs market in the world. The sentence above could be fixed by placing a comma after 'world'.

No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . ?and so on.

as in the Old English word burh (place), which became variously burgh as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and bury as in Canterbury.

If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently.

The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.

Where the British will say howjado for "how do you do," an American will say jeetjet for "have you taken sustenance recently?" and lesskweet for "in that case, let us retire to a convivial place for a spot of refreshment.

meat was any food (the sense is preserved in "meat and drink" and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it).

But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all.

Bathroom is first noted in 1836, though toilet paper, intriguingly, isn't found before 1880.

No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . ?and so on.

At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only.

85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep, eat, house, and so on.

Shakespeare] è una sorta di equivalente letterario dell'elettrone: è lì ma non è lì.

It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

It is true that William Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, "Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust," which takes on additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad, while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper.

These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem. It is striking to think that when we heckle a speaker today we use a term that recalls the preparation of flax from the early Middle Ages.

shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally

dried cow pies—known euphemistically and rather charmingly as "surface coal.

There is something in what he said. English is a merry confusion of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense.

To reduce dangers at night, people covered fires with a kind of domed lid called a coverfeu (from which comes the word curfew)

One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.

Or look at the old money, with its florins and half crowns and thrupenny bits, and imagine what it was like in the days when people had to add tuppence ha'penny to one shilling four nibblings or whatever. With