Quotes About Linguistics

Il parle couramment la vérité, mais personne ne le comprend car il use d'une langue morte.

there is no word in Hebrew for "goddess," so the word cannot appear in the Old Testament.

The Gaulish language ended up contributing very little to the vocabulary of modern French. Only about a hundred Gaulish words survived the centuries, mostly rural and agricultural terms such as bouleau (birch), sapin (fir), lotte (monkfish), mouton (sheep), charrue (plow), sillon (furrow), lande (moor) and boue (mud)—that's eight percent of the total. However, Gaulish is still relatively well-known, partly because it left many place and family names in northern France.

It was the French of the Normans that, grafting itself onto the barbaric Saxon tongue, gave it its most magnificent blossoming. And, in these new countries, where both English and French are intertwined again, it is as if English were bathing itself in the fountain of its own youth, and as if French were remembering the buried treasures it had thought forgotten.

Si ricordò di alcune riflessioni che aveva annotato di recente sul suo quadernetto. A proposito della povertà di vocabolario riguardante il mare. Solo i greci avevano tante parole per definirlo. Hals, il sale, il mare in quanto materia. Pelagos, la distesa d'acqua, il mare come visione, spettacolo. Pontos, il mare spazio e via di comunicazione. Thalassa, il mare in quanto evento. Kolpos, lo spazio marittimo che abbraccia la riva, il golfo o la baia...

les moules — comment dit-on—?

Diction is not memorizing vocabulary, not memorizing word lists, not overusing the thesaurus, not replacing all the short words with long ones.

The linguist still believed in the superstition of logic

The invention of languages is the foundation.The "stories" were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows

A popular Internet essay notes: "There is no egg in egg plant, neither apple nor pine in pineapple. A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? If teachers taught, why haven't preachers praught? We have noses that run and feet that smell. How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

There are deeper types of symbolism, in a sense artificial, and yet such that we could not get on without them. Language, written or spoken, is such a symbolism.

An idiolect. That's what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He's been too blithe, he'd forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

Does "anal-retentive" have a hyphen?

Over nineteenth-century telegraph wires OK would have been sent in the original Morse code, also known as American Morse or Railroad Morse, in the pattern dot-gap-dot dash-dot-dash, rather than dash-dash-dash dash-dot-dash of today's International Morse Code. The O was signaled by two dots with a long intracharacter gap to distinguish it from I, which used two dots with a short intracharacter gap.

I've spent enough time studying languages to know that almost any phrase can have two meanings

Qu'est-ce que le texte, sinon un gigantesque cartilage verbal?

'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it?

It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn't even have words like click and jump and page.

All language is a popularity contest.

The hardest portion of English, I must say it: Idioms.

Trying to speak correct English is not easy.

The sibilant s is the most difficult sound to correct.

English accepts more curses than any other language, and I soon learned to curse with the commoners.

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.