Quotes About Linguistics

The ability of humans to speak a modern language and the evolution of our ability to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thus appear to parallel each other.

She had learnt the lingo, but only to speak to her servants, so she knew none of the politer forms and of the verbs only the imperative mood.

Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.

Homosexual,' generally used in scientific works is of course a bastard word. 'Homogenic' has been suggested, as being from two roots, both Greek, i.e., 'homos,' same, and 'genos,' sex.

I always put the apostrophe in "ain't" to make certain I'm using proper improper English.

English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.

The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells."

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don't know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we're doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past.

If you compulsively pun you are called a paronomasiac.

Fluency in even one other language would be fantastic.

I could never learn to be totally fluent in any other language.

Much of the magic of language, of course, lies in its fluidity.

'Escargot' is French for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm'.

My French is still good. That's a beautiful language and I'm happy to speak it.

I like to listen to French radio; I'm trying to learn French.

French was my first language.

Even if I think in English, it's more a language of acting than French.

Some words, you know, it's amazing but some words would come only in French, and when I speak French, it would only come in English. And so the adjustment is very difficult sometimes.

It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.

Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]...

when Miss St. John called "le bon pain," "lee bong pang.

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

Swahili is a modified form of the Arabic sawa-hil, meaning 'coast people?