Quotes About Linguistics

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. I hate this language. It changes too often!

I Need to Learn Many, Many More Cusswords in Sign Language

How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.)

A colleague of hers had discovered that the Biblical sentence found in John 4:7 contained all the sounds in nearly every known language.

The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini.

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

A fine writer must appreciate and accept the power of language manifestly.

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

For example, a telegram is a "lightning-letter"; a wireless telegram is a "not-have-wire-lightning-communication"; a fountain-pen is a "self-flow-ink-water-brush"; a typewriter is a "strike-letter-machine". Most of these neologisms are similar in the modern languages of China and Japan.

I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day.

English words made only from twenty-six characters? Are English a bit lazy or what? We have fifty thousand characters in Chinese.

Little by little I was starting to like Hiruko, which surprised me. "And are you a Buddhist?" I asked her. "No, I'm not a Buddhist. I'm a linguist." "Is that a religion?" "Not really, but languages can make people happy, and show them what's beyond death.

But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her.

An anonymously written piece about 1900 has the letter H complaining to the Cockneys that it has been banished "from 'ouse, from 'ome, from 'ope, from 'eaven; and placed by your most learned society in Hexile, Hanguish and Hanxiety.

Likewise, India's Hindi and Pakistan's Urdu are fundamentally the same tongue, only using Devanagari script in India, Arabic letters in Pakistan. And Yiddish, while not exactly German, is closely akin to it. Yet Yiddish is written in Hebrew letters, and German in Roman ones.

vowel" coming via medieval French from the Latin adjective vocalis, "using the voice.

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the Egyptian word for "there.

The gh at the end of many modern words, however, like dough, cough, and trough, is actually an artifact not of Dutch orthographic tendencies, but of Norman distaste for the Middle English letter yogh, which looked like this: 3. Yogh fell out of use around the end of the fifteenth century.

It is not possible to translate a language that does not exist.

Scabbard?" I guessed. "Penis warmer," she told me.

las palabras nunca son fruto del azar. Que todas tienen un pasado, una especie de genética que las delata. —Eso es lo que estudia la etimología...

It's hard to see what the problem is. Language speakers and writers have always been inventive, and texting is just one further example of human creativity. As David Crystal has expressed it: 'it..is the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative... In texting, we are seeing, in a small way, language in evolution...

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.