Quotes About Linguistics

To be an actor, I had to learn Marathi. I used to always grudge why there are so many alphabets in Marathi.

beautifully bungled prepositions. Language

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants – and not all of them – have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

I am is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that I do is the longest sentence?

Is there another word for synonym?

Can linguistic framing change the kind of person someone is? The answer seems to be yes, though possibly not in extreme cases.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.

I can speak a little bit of Hindi but understand every word.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

I was inspired by 'Bootylicious' being able to scale the dictionary walls thanks to just one individual, Beyonce. But Beyonce has the world's ears, so what I had to do was to work my word - which is 'honk', as slang for money, really really hard.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

The educated Southerner has no use for an 'r', except at the beginning of a word.

'Morsel' is a perfect word. Forming those six letters on the lips and tongue prompts an instantaneous physiological reaction. The mouth waters. The lips purse.

The trouble with the dictionary is that you have to know how a word is spelled before you can look it up to see how it is spelled.

There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

I love the English language. Words have power.

I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

Linguistic supersizing is on the increase, and it may show the influence of advertising-speak and corporate jargon on language, in which everything needs to be hyped to get noticed. It means that some of our greatest words are losing their power.

I speak French, German, English, and Dutch, and I can say a few words in Spanish - none of these languages have anything to do with Valyrian.