Quotes About Linguistics

Ever since third grade, I had a notebook and was putting together words just for fun. I liked different etymologies, different slang that came out in different eras. Different languages. Different dialects.

English is full of Scandinavian words. Margate, Ramsgate, Billingsgate, any town with a 'gate' on it takes their suffix from the Danish word 'gade' which simply means 'street.'

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.

In Bulgaria, they use the Cyrillic alphabet, which is completely different from ours. You can't sound the words out, so you can't read street signs or packages in the grocery store! You have to rely on pictures and guesses.

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.

The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.

The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows from the self-forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it.

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

Language is best used where it is most efficiently abused.

As there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere.

Lexicographer—A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.

I just didn't have time to deliver a Buffalo accent in a day, so I didn't even try it.

Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality.

You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

There is something real signified by that word 'just' that proper language won't acknowledge. It's a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

I discovered that the predisposition for languages is as mysterious as the inclination of certain people for mathematics or music and has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge. It is something separate, a gift that some possess and others don't.

la predisposición para los idiomas es tan misteriosa como la de ciertas personas para las matemáticas o la música, no tiene nada que ver con la inteligencia ni el conocimiento. Es algo aparte, un don que algunos poseen y otros no.

like textual glossolalia.

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek words meta (which means from one place to another) and ferein (which means to carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor.

It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same meaning derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root.

In Middle English, cod meant a bag or a sack, or by inference, a scrotum, which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece.