Quotes About Linguistics

For some odd reason, Compact Discs and Digital Video Discs are spelled as discs, not disks.

What's fun about homonyms is hearig a word in a sentence and suddenly realizing that it has a homonym or maybe two (or three, but that's so rare I don't often think about homonym quartets) and that you haven't thought of that homonym pair or trio before.

Bop-u-top nop-o-bop-o-dop-yop kop-nop-o-wop-sop hop-o-wop top-o sop-pop-e-a-kop 'op-talk.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Grammar, which is the art of using words properly, comprises four parts: Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody.

has been demanded, on one hand, that men should write as they speak; but, as it has been shown that this conformity never was attained in any language, and that it is not more easy to persuade men to agree exactly in speaking than in writing, it may be asked, with equal propriety, why men do not rather speak as they write. In

APOCOPE  (APO'COPE)   n.s.[  figure in grammar,when the last letter or syllable of a word is taken away; as, ingeni for ingenii.

Ou is frequently used in the last syllable of words which in Latin end in or and are made English, as honour, labour, favour, from honor, labor, favor. Some late innovators have ejected the u, without considering that the last syllable gives the sound neither of or nor ur, but a sound between them, if not compounded of both; besides that they are probably derived to us from the French nouns in eur, as honeur, faveur.

C might be omitted in the language without loss, since one of its sounds might be supplied by, s, and the other by k, but that it preserves to the eye the etymology of words, as face from facies, captive from captivus.

C, according to English orthography, never ends a word; therefore we write stick, block, which were originally, sticke, blocke. In such words c is now mute.

Roumanian is an easy language. You just add a tl to everything.

The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury.

Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don't ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eight (October), the eleventh called the ninth (November), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?

It wasn't fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping—pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective.

All grammars leak.

It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.

English, once accepted as an international language, is no more secure than French has proved to be as the one and only accepted language of diplomacy or as Latin has proved to be as the international language of science.

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

The spoken language is a symbolization of something that happened, could have happened, or is in the process of happening, while the written language is a symbolization of the spoken language. James Joyce, for example, dedicated his life to trying to close the gap between the two systems. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce portrays in writing the workings of the verbal parts of the brain.

Every language carries phenomenal knowledge within it; never depend on your language only; otherwise, you can neither improve that nor become aware of new things; therefore, read and learn that continuously.

laborious filters of Italian pronunciation

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish

When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn't take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn't learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn't learned anything at all.