Quotes About Linguistics

An English speaker who has never studied French already knows around 15,000 French words!

Boff," Agent Brent said. "I didn't know people used that word anymore." "You young whippersnappers just don't know a good piece of slang when you hear it

This was the second time I'd asked about his wife. I seemed to be speaking English, but perhaps my questions were really Swahili and I just didn't realize it.

this wonder of an Englishman who spoke indifferent but comprehensible Greek.… Before we parted he drew a

I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.

to employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meanings is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change.

The KiKongo language, spoken around the Congo River's mouth, is one of the African tongues whose traces linguists have found in the Gullah dialect spoken by black Americans today on the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

Walks all ass straw.' 'I beg your pardon?' 'The car. A classic. Ass-straw translates as star, I believe.

I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.

How old does one have to be still to say tits?

Italians basic word chest, as tallied in a recent dictionary, totals a measly 200,000, compared to English's 600,000 (not counting technical terms). But

Se io studiassi di più l'italiano, lo parlerei meglio.

I hold Petrarch at leastly partly responsible for the disconcerting gap between Italian's written and spoken vocabularies. The

putting beginning walkers in a "falling cap" or "pudding." So named for its resemblance to black pudding, this was a sausage-shaped padded roll that went around the head and was kept in place with a chin strap. Having seen the pictures, I have to wonder if parents used them because they kept children safe or because they looked hysterical. They eventually disappeared, but left a linguistic remnant in the term of endearment puddinhead.

He swore at us in German (which I should judge to be a singularly effective language for that purpose)...

I don't swear just for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should use all the words we've got. Besides, there are damn few words that anybody understands. Henry Drummond, a character in Inherit the Wind

the queen a copy of Henry Watson Fowler's famous 1926 guide to the English language, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

French, the language of diplomacy. Spanish, the language of bureaucracy.

He would say ect. instead of ect., and thus instead of ect., instead of ect. and thus and so forth!

It's fitting to learn things you don't know. Anyone who doesn't know other languages is handicapped.

Anyone who doesn't know other languages is handicapped

Ugarit ... in contrast to later Canaanite languages, there is no article.

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.