Quotes About Linguistics

Isn't it interesting that—in the English language, at least—there's a word for making things simple ("simplification" or "simplify"), but no word for making things easy or fun.

It may be—I will argue so—that communication outward is only a secondary, socially stimulated phase in the acquisition of language. Speaking to oneself would be the primary function (considered by L. S. Vygotsky in the early 1930s, this profoundly suggestive hypothesis has received little serious examination since).

any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, . . . any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is . . . underwritten by the assumption of God's presence.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

To be honest, I struggle with words. I often forget them, you know, the official ones. Instead, I make words up. I use home-made words that sound similar to the real thing. Usually, they're some sort of confused hybrid of two existing words.

take words and make them useful,' she told me. 'drain them of all the crappy meanings they used to mean and make them mean something useful instead.

The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it.

Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Sometimes people have a difficult time understanding my English.

I recall that, the first time I met a Geordie speaker, it was some days before I could understand a single word he was saying.

So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.

A fly was very close to being called a land, because that's what it does half the time.

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from Disappearance of Literature

There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called separable verbs. The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England.

There is no such thing as "the Queen's English." The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares! Following the Equator

get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there. p. 591

They were virtuosos of alliteration and didn't know it.