Quotes About Linguistics

I am most familiar with the Gujarati language.

While I can't speak Telugu, I do understand the language.

I can speak Tamil fluently, and the sentence structures in Telugu are quite similar.

I can understand Tamil and Telugu when a conversation is aimed at me, but I cannot hold a conversation.

Telugu is a lot like Kannada, so I don't have a problem with Telugu. But Tamil is very difficult to learn, man.

I may not write poetry in Telugu but I need to get the nuances right.

I speak Telugu, so learning Kannada was not all that tough.

I could easily master Telugu, but picking up Malayalam was challenging.

The English word sin is derived from the German term Sünde, which carries the connotation of sundering or dividing.

In his roaming about the world the giant adventurer had picked up a wide smattering of knowledge, particularly including the speaking and reading of many alien tongues. Many a sheltered scholar would have been astonished at the Cimmerian's linguistic abilities, for he had experienced many adventures where knowledge of a strange language had meant the difference between life and death.

And on the menu, it says "bill of fare". They won't use "menu", you see, because it was French.

Erudite, for a woman who confuses "you're" and "your" and goes in for random capitalisation.' 'We

afterward. The Saxons called the stern of a boat the aft and their word ward meant "in the direction of." Thus aftward meant "toward the rear of a ship," or "behind." Over the years, the word aftward changed in spelling to afterward and came to mean "behind in time," "later on," or "later.

That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else's words in a voice that somehow was and wasn't your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but-as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it-words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefor I am.

Don't bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don't "purify" it.

I have a disease; I see language.

There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.

The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural. The artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents -- this artifact is mimicked in a more or less ludic manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable: something like chess.

la vérité est impossible avec le langage

printed fashion functions, semiologically speaking, like a true mythology of clothing: it is even because the vestimentary signified is here objectified, thickened, that fashion is mythic. So it is this mythology of clothing (one could also say its utopia) that needs to be the first stage of a vestimentary linguistics.

A few years later, in Inukjuak, I learned that SFU is the Inuit texting acronym for snowmobile fucked up, and that POOS is the acronym for passed out on snowmobile.

All in the Cyrillic alphabet. Named for Saint Cyril, who worked on alphabets in the ninth century.

At first I thought common nouns were hardest hit, coffee and doorway and so on, but it soon became clear that the missing were mostly adjectives.

They've a temper, some of them--particularly verbs: they're the proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however I can manage the whole lot of them!