Quotes About Linguistics

The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English. Then I'd be able to charge you an upgrade fee every time I add new letters like N and T.

A speaker is like a lousy auto mechanic: Every time he fixes something in the language, he screws up something else.

I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi , never the hoi polloi , because hoi meant the, and two the's were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say.

It is the language, maybe?" he asked. "I know the vocabulary, but still I am not capable to work the language the way I want to. There is no special word for 'you' when it is you that I am speaking to. In English there is only one 'you,' and I have to say the same 'you' to you that I would say to a stranger; I cannot express my closeness.

Next fall I'm taking his honors course in linguistic anthropology." "You think they don't teach foreign languages in San Diego?" he asked.

Sheila Finch was born and raised in London, England. She did graduate work in medieval literature and linguistics at Indiana University. Dragged to California in 1962 by her (then) husband, she fell in love with the state and has stayed there ever since. She taught fiction writing and the literature of science fiction for thirty years at El Camino College, in Torrance, California. She lives in Long Beach with a cat and a retired racing greyhound.

Stop your bitching, Nick. You should try being an immortal demon who's lived since the dawn of time having to sit through this crap when English is not my native tongue, and if you think you're fluent in it, buddy, I actually know what a gerund is.

I've always felt very comfortable with accents. Once I get an accent, I can do it, and that's just something I've been able to do my whole life.

I'm pretty good with languages. I know a bit of French and actually want to live in France some day so that I can get fluent. I think it'd be tragic to go through life only knowing one language.

at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...

Italian has fewer words in common with Sardinian than it does with French. And the two languages look very different when written down. For example, the Italian proverb Il sangue non è acqua (the equivalent of "Blood is thicker than water") in Sardu becomes Su sambene no est abba. The overwhelming majority of Sardinians—about a million people—speak Sardu, which has three dialects of its own.

Incidentally, it seems that 'apartment' has finally taken over from 'flat'; I fancy they'll soon have 'closets' rather than wardrobes. Anyway,

the words lex monetae are really just a polite Latin way of saying, "Suck it, creditors.

On a more specifically practical level, my main initial impression was to do with the fact that nobody spoke English. Okay, that's an exaggerated way of putting it, a good few people did speak English

In Polish, the language of Poland, all green vegetables are known as w?oszczyzna, which means 'things Italian

learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which said that the language you spoke affected how you processed reality.

an interrobang is an unorthodox combination of question mark and exclamation point. How did this happen?!!!???

I had no idea that there were that many filthy insults available to the average speaker of Galactic Standard.

The pronunciation of both Sami and Portuguese languages is strikingly similar: the Portuguese evolved from folksy Latin while the Sami evolved from reindeers' howling.

wymowa j?zyka saamskiego i portugalskiego jest zaskakuj?co podobna. J?zyk portugalski wywodzi si? przecie? z ludowej ?aciny, a saamski z porykiwania reniferów.

pues nunca, que yo sepa, hubo verbos que al más avaro le dolieran en la bolsa.

I've always felt like I could express myself better in English just because the way the grammar works.

I, like many annoying pedants, will wince when someone says 'less' when they should have said 'fewer.' But my 'poor' sounds like poo-ah, not pore; and my 'grass' rhymes with mass, not farce. What's wrong with that?

I speak four languages and read a great deal, so I do as much working out on the brain as I do on the body.