Quotes About Linguistics

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 wanted to about how language worked. I hadn't learned anything at all.

Arabic also has a far greater facility to communicate sarcasm, and it can be employed precisely, or with pitch-perfect irony.

that is not just a relative pronoun but also a stand-alone pronoun, a demonstrative adjective, and a conjunction.

British grammarian: "It is clearly desirable that an anaphoric (backward-looking) or cataphoric (forward-looking) pronoun should be placed as near as the construction allows to the noun or noun phrase to which it refers, and in such a manner that there is no risk of ambiguity.

The notion of 'Queen's English' is usually applied to our pronunciation.

Well, I've never dropped the word 'eh.' That's still at the end of my sentence, replacing the question mark.

I had a quick ear and could pick up languages.

I seem to have a bit of a knack for accents; I can pick them up quick enough.

I learned English, my sixth language at this point, quite quickly.

My teacher was like, 'Once you pass age nine or ten, it's almost impossible to completely lose an accent.' I did lose it quite a bit, but Indians can always tell.

The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

I say the word N-U-C-L-E-R the same way that George W. Bush says it.

Sadly, my German is almost non-existent, although I did a little at school.

I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.

I understand German; I can read German.

Sometimes I don't use the words 'will' and 'want' in the right way. The German word 'will' is the English word 'want,' so that's a little bit of the problem.

Every German child learns to speak English in school.

I can speak a bit of German.

You need a lot of words to say anything in German.

You know, I grew up in the East part of Germany so we never had English in school, we had to learn Russian.

I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.

The reason they call it 'golf' is that all the other 4 letter words were used up.

Sichuanese dialect is like Mandarin put through a mangle. So the Mandarin 'sh' becomes 's', vowels are stretched out like warm toffee, there are pirate-like rolling 'r' sounds at the end of sentences, and no one can tell the difference between 'n' and 'l' or 'f' and 'h' (the province of Hunan, for example, is known in Sichuan, helpfully, as 'Fulan').