Quotes About Linguistics

I'm flatulent in many languages.

institutional facts in general require language because the language is partly constitutive of the facts. But

It is only proper to realize that language is largely a historical accident.

I have also paid some attention to what language can tell us. Messages perish as they are uttered, but language itself is remarkably durable. Sometimes it preserves useful clues to a more abstract and thought-oriented part of the human past than material artifacts do.

Why is it that when you wipe up dust its called dusting but when you wipe up a spill its not called spilling? Just something to think about.

And Philippe won't speak English. She's sure he can - he's got that European je ne sais quoi that usually means "Oh, I speak six languages. And a little Japanese.

To have another language is to possess a second soul." – Charlemagne

Others were translated, for example, Churchton became Kirkby.

The most effective way to avoid dejection, motivated or gratuitous, is to take a dictionary, preferably of a language you scarcely know, and to look up word after word in it, making sure they are the kind you will never use.

It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.

As users of English we often need a grammatical device to make reference to the way a particular event unfolds in time. This is called aspect.

It is because the verb BE has a plain form which does not share its shape with any of the present tense forms that we need to distinguish the plain form as a distinct inflectional form. And if we do so for BE we should do so for all verbs.

It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

Bizarrely, our English word 'sturdy' may go back to the Latin turdus, thrush. Anyone described as 'sturdy' in the 1200s was wilfully reckless and possibly as immovable as a sozzled bird.

Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.

I speak a little bit of French and German, but apparently, I'm really bad at Dutch. The pronunciations are quite hard. I tried to say 'hello' in Dutch, and it did not work. People were just like, 'What?'

Quite often people ask me 'Is there a word for... ' and go on to highlight a gap in our language that we need to fill.

When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds, when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.

It took me just three months to pick up Hindi. I guess I'm a fast learner when it comes to languages.

Hindi is far easier a language to pick up than Tamil.

I've been offered bi-linguals and tri-linguals to be made in Hindi and south languages.

the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing.

After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself.

A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well—better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.