Quotes About Linguistics

New words can spread like wildfire thanks to social media - you only have to look at 'mansplaining' and 'milkshake duck' to see language evolution at work - so why not old ones too?

I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language!

The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it.

English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite.

The East Texas accent is a famously difficult accent to do.

Singing beautiful melodies is one thing, but to deliver the text so that the people understand it, even in a foreign language, has to be worked at very hard.

Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.

Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are many Aramaic texts from the time of Jesus, so one can get a pretty good idea of what the language of Jesus looked liked.

The one thing about internet language, people join it, and what quickly evolves is an 'internet dialect,' as it were.

Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex - pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51.

A syllabary is a system in which each syllable of the language is represented by its own sign.

One of the first Greek words to be recognised in Linear B was represented

The Phoenician script was in effect a syllabary.

by leaving out the vowels, it had the great advantage of reducing the number of signs to just over twenty.

The Semitic signs were given names that served as mnemonics for the respective sounds: alf, bet, and so on.

This is why, when the Greeks adapted this system for their own use, they called it the 'alphabet'.

The people of the coastal lowlands have their own languages, related to Hittite.

Many of the most characteristic Macedonian names are transparently formed from Greek words.

Alternatively, it may be that a form of early Indo-European arrived with the first farmers

Greek slowly emerged—distinct from others of the Indo-European group and incorporating elements

the distant origin of the Greek language may reach all the way back to the beginning of the period that we call the Neolithic

the distant origin of the Greek language may reach all the way back to the beginning of the period that we call the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.