Quotes About Linguistics

According to my wife, my use of vocabulary is wide and varied.

Among the various vernaculars that are spoken in different parts of India, there is one that stands out strongly from the rest, as that which is most widely known. It is Hindi. A man who knows Hindi can travel over India and find everywhere Hindi-speaking people.

I tend to curse in French more often than I do in English.

una cosa era escribir sin la e y otra muy distinta traducir sin la e

La mala palabra no nació así. La sociedad la hizo mala.

A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language.

English doesn't give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she.

a variety of languages

NEFARIOUS means utterly, completely wicked. The character in The Wizard of Oz could have been called the Nefarious Witch of the West but authors like to use the same beginning consonant, often. Perhaps L. Frank Baum crossed out nefarious after wicked came to his mind. Thank goodness, because Nefarious would be a terrible name for a musical.

I loved to say quasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. I am quasi ready to go, I would announce. Or, I'm feeling a bit quasi today. Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-quasi. Or wild and quasi girl.

the more languages you know, the better you understand your own. He realised that languages divide the world up differently from each other. He was half French, and had often wondered why it was that his French personality was different from his British one. In French he was more emphatic and rhetorical. Somebody had told him once that in Russian there was no word for blue. There was bound to be a word for pushrod, or tappet, though.

Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians

lady," a word she had found out came from the Anglo-Saxon "lafdig," meaning "she who makes the bread.

One of his peculiarities was never to speak a word of French, which he however wrote with great facility.

besoin et nécessité sont deux synonymes entre lesquels il y a tout un monde d'intervalle.

Balzampleu!" said the Swiss, who, despite the fine collection of oaths boasted by the German language, had taken to swearing in French.

Moreover, every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolve the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Like their parents, the Korean children used more verbs than the English-speaking kids, while the English-speaking kids used more nouns. But in addition, the Korean-speaking children learned how to solve problems like using the rake to get the out-of-reach toy well before the English-speaking children. English speakers, though, started categorizing objects earlier than the Korean speakers.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.

Parlez-vous français, aussi?

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.