Quotes About Linguistics

A semicomma, we should note, doesn't exist; we just made the word up. But it sounds like a punctuation mark that should exist, doesn't it?

The majority of public school programs using total communication employ a form of Signed English for the sign language component.

Stick." I said in Russian. I had no clue what the word for stake was. I pointed at the silver ring I wore and made a slashing motion. "Stick. where?" He stared at me in utter confusion and then asked in perfect English, "why are you talking like that?

Why is S-A-S pronounced S-A-W? It should be Ar-Kansas. Did Kansas object?

Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.

English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits . . . probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing as 'the King's English'—for 'the King's English' was French. English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew . . . and it did!—enormously.

If the word ''fuck'' is ''obscene'' or ''dirty'', why isn't the word ''duck'' 75% ''dirty''?

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the is of identity from the English language. (The is of identity takes the form X is a Y. E.g., Joe is a Communist, Mary is a dumb file-clerk, The universe is a giant machine, etc.) In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words is or to be and the Bourland proposal (English without isness) he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

If you hypnotized somebody and told him not to use the word "nose," and then asked him to explain the sense of smell, you would get the same kind of drifting linguistic snow banks in his answers. Intellectuals, who have more abstractions stored in their biocomputers, are more skilled at this than most, but all can do it to some extent.

So: if you have tried to abandon sexist terminology and have seen some changes in your perceptions and human relations thereafter, why not try getting rid of "is" and "all" and see what happens? As Benjamin Lee Whorf stated, "A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.

If this begins to sound like nonsense, that is inevitable on this level. As Lewis Morgan notes, in books on linguistics there always comes a point at which the prose itself becomes wildly incomprehensible, disintegrating into nonsense.

Physics joined linguistics, mathematics and psychology in this metaprogramming hall of mirrors when Schrödinger demonstrated that quantum events are not objective" in the Newtonian sense. For fifty years since then, physicists have been struggling to build a system that will get them out of this Strange Loop. The results have been as funny as a Zen koan.

You good with Arabic?" Bam! Out of left field, and now Stone was smiling. There were many Arabic dialects, from Moroccan Arabic with Berber words which often did not even sound Arabic, to the aristocratic Arabic spoken by the Saudi royal family, which was different from the Arabic spoken in the streets.

Pike rolled down his window and motioned them over. Pike spoke Spanish pretty well, along with French, gutter German, a little Vietnamese, a little Arabic, and enough Swahili to make himself understood to most Bantu speakers.

I do so like all-encompassing words. Verb, adjective, noun. Yes, you are shitted.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A

They went outside and stood where a sign used to say Taxi and now said Taxi/Tacsi for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

The most common answer is that our language is amazingly supple.

Nuestro lenguaje evolucionó como una variante de chismorreo.

A second theory agrees that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world. But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.