Quotes About Linguistics

Jack Paar mentioned that he once had said to a young friend, "Why do you kids use 'cool' to mean 'hot'?" The friend replied, "Because you folks used up the word 'hot' before we came along.

It's a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it.

Demi's linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like, Up you! or Ballshit! For I am referring to Demi's use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase--Demi's speech-bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant, given the context.

I really believe that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding. – Leibniz

He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant.

Chaldean roots which are surely to be traced in the Cornish branch of the great Celtic speech.

As you are aware, E is the most common letter in the English alphabet

In one scene, when I was supposed to say, In a pig's eye you are, what came out was, In a pig's ass you are. Old habits die awfully hard.

Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that—if Herodotus can be believed—was "unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.

At what point will elegant linguistic languor be permanently usurped by text-speak expediency? When will we humans abandon the ability to generate long, complex, lusciously worded emotional expressions—like Elizabethan sonnets!

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don't like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven's sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs

The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or no they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time. Poppycock means soft shit - from the Dutch, I need scarcely remind you, pappe kak.

I will never forget my puzzlement when, in a vocabulary list, it presented the verb thaumazo, offering this helpful thought: "thaumazo, I wonder, or marvel at. This is easily remembered by thinking of the English word 'thaumaturge.'" And I suppose that was true, since I've never forgotten it.

This or that is proclaimed awesome every second sentence - and we have lost a wonderful English word.

One thing I can say about the French language is that no one in the world loves their language as much as they do.

Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty; Greek three; and English simply one.

Admittedly, the nature of language is one of the most mysterious questions that exists for man to ponder on.

What kind of person actually sits down and decides that no one should be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition? Not even decide what ideas you should or shouldn't talk about, but to actually make rules about what order to put your words in... It's such an amazing kind of petty tyranny.

In French, as in other romance languages, speakers are forced to choose whether they'll address someone using the respectful form (vous) or the familiar form (tu). Even English, which doesn't embed status into verb conjugations, embeds it elsewhere. Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name (Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones), whereas intimates and subordinates were called by first name.

Yet there is no verb in biblical Hebrew that means to obey.

Is thyselves even a word?

you may hear the UBIQUITOUS LANGUAGE changing naturally while a document is being left behind.

The Luther Bible was to the modern German language what the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible were to the modern English language. Before Luther's Bible, there was no unified German language.

Soon everyone spoke German the way Luther's translation did. As television has had a homogenizing effect on the accents and dialects of Americans, watering down accents and sanding down sharp twangs, Luther's Bible created a single German tongue.