Quotes About Linguistics

the rules of English grammar are largely an artificial construct with little or no bearing on the language as it is spoke.

Bollocks, I thought, or testiculi or possibly testiculos if we were using the accusative.

Vanessa made a strange inarticulate sound common to Germans who've figured out how to start a sentence but don't know how it ends.

studying dead languages and

In the end, Harrington documented more than 130 languages, including Chemehuevi, Mohave, Serrano, Paiute, even K'iche'. Many of them are no longer spoken anywhere on this planet. They are preserved only in Harrington's careful records and perhaps in the fading childhood memories of the descendants of their last surviving speakers.

Tim was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages. So ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Second, that the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands his environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue.

all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language.

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.

When you go to school in Holland you learn to speak English and write in English - but English is different from the Scottish language!

Diphthongs are indicated by combinations of hooks and circles.

With verbs randomly scattered about instead of neatly stacked at the end of each sentence, verbs that had no real endings, and nondeclension nouns, the language was oral chaos.

Foreign languages was the only thing that interested me when I was at school, so playing in another language... it is quite demanding because if it is not your mother tongue, you are missing some connotations and some emotional depth of certain things.

I must confess... I don't know any tongue but the Nether-Dutch.

Apart from English, I speak my mother tongue Malayalam, as well as Tamil, Telugu, and a bit of Kannada and French.

My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say 'night came suddenly'; you would say 'the sky rolled over and changed its sides.'

From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.

Tamil is my mother tongue.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

We just say things differently in Australia - like torch. I'd ask, 'Can I have the torch?' It seems to fall flat when I say, 'Can I have the flashlight?'

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.

Becky, are you studying conversational Yiddish?