Quotes About Linguistics

At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

The Romans, Jones pointed out, called a man in love salax, in a salted state, which is the origin of the word salacious.

One of the consequences of printing is that it tends to standardize language

Greek, a language in which everything is pronounced exactly as written

When I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English. I thought that "hat," say, was the real and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word "ibu," say, to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word "hat.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

Words change meaning over time, and often in unpredictable ways. Queen Anne is said (probably apocryphally) to have commented about Sir Christopher Wren's architecture at St. Paul's Cathedral that it was awful, artificial, and amusing—by which she meant that it was awe-inspiring, highly artistic, and thought-provoking.

Every word is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered.

A vowel is that which without impact of tongue or lip has an audible sound.

Afrikaans is one of the world's best languages in which to curse; even when spoken politely, it can bruise innocent bystanders.

It's no picnic, your Russian grammar; you have to mind your p's and q's.

The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.

Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does.

impenetrability of the Navajo code was all down to the fact that Navajo belongs to the Na-Dene family of languages, which has no link with any Asian or European language.

alphabetic scripts tend to have between 20 and 40 characters (Russian, for example, has 36 signs, and Arabic has 28).

scripts that rely on semagrams tend to have hundreds or even thousands of signs (Chinese has over 5,000).

They called the Navajo language a "weird succession of guttural, nasal, tongue-twisting sounds Ã¢â'¬Â¦ we couldn't even transcribe it, much less crack it.

The letters a and l are the most common in Arabic, partly because of the definite article al-, whereas the letter j appears only a tenth as frequently.

Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.

It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs

Of course words are magic. That's why they call it spelling.

At birth, your baby can distinguish between the sounds of every language that has ever been invented. Professor Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, discovered this phenomenon. She calls kids at this age "citizens of the world." Chomsky puts it this way: We are not born with the capacity to speak a specific language. We are born with the capacity to speak any language.

Not to pun at all would be more challenging than most people might imagine.

a suave Chinese gentleman named King, who had been a Confucian scholar and now was an elder in the church, taught the Bells the tones and characters of one of the world's most difficult languages. A slight mistake of tone may produce a completely different meaning in Chinese so the Bell's good ear for music was useful. They needed all their youthful stamina and powers of concentration, but Nelson proved a natural linguist, driven onward by awareness that he must soon run the hospital