Quotes About Linguistics

Akkadian loanwords are completely assimilated to Aramaic, both phonologically and morphologically.

Proto Indo European!

Linguista sum, linguistici nihil a me alienum puto.

The opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy.

I believe that the poetic incompetence of some bigoted linguists has been mis­ taken for an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us here, however, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachro­nisms.

The use of the plough goes back to pre-Harappan times and one of the words frequently used for the plough – langala – is from Munda, a non-Aryan language.

He would rather decline 2 drinks than one German verb."18

Another translational problem is that many languages make use of idioms, or figures of speech, that mean something in the original language but not necessarily in the translated language.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language.

the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the component words is known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact.

Ich möchte den Ausdruck ' Ich weiß ' für die Fälle reservieren , in denen er im normalen Sprachverkehr gebraucht wird.

porque o adjetivo é a alma do idioma, a sua porção idealista e metafísica. O substantivo é a realidade nua e crua, é o naturalismo do vocabulário.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

I love anything that is going to make language richer and stronger. But when words are used in a way that is going to weaken language, it has nothing to do with the beautiful way that they can wriggle and wiggle and develop and enrich our speech, but instead it is impoverishing, diminishing. If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free—though we may buy more of the product.

Western communication has what linguists call a transmitter orientation--that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. ...within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.

A man who has the ability to generate a new word and to inject it into the bloodstream of the language seems to me only a little lower than the Creator of light and darkness. If you write a book, you may be fortunate enough to be read for a while, until other, better books come along and take its place; but to produce a new word is to approach immortality.

No one ever asks about the language.