Quotes About Linguistics

The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, 'Blah, blah, blah.' That's when I get crazy.

Ah, these double meanings," she said. "Who invented the English language, I wonder? He did not do a stellar job of it, whoever he was.

Téléclitoridienne means simply "female of the distant clitoris," but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it—calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than "frigid.

The Spanish for 'vacuum' is aspiradora.

I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek, I eat heartily without Greek.

explanation of the difference between a language and a dialect:

O que quer dizer metalíngua senão tradução? Não se pode falar de uma língua senão em outra língua." Jacques Lacan, L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre

Her English, though accented, was idiomatic. She would have learned it young enough to pick up the idiom, but not quite young enough to eradicate the accent.

But there are some rare terms that simply don't have satisfactory, simple words that adequately express the same thing, and the word hypostasis (plural: hypostases) is one of them.

In the case of natural languages, the linguists Sapir and Whorf hypothesize a relationship between the expressive power of a language and the ability to think certain thoughts. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that your ability to think a thought depends on knowing words capable of expressing the thought. If you don't know the words, you can't express the thought and

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It's wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It's automatic. It creates empathy.

In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.

When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader's attention and memory.

Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean.

As a psycholinguist who once wrote an entire book on the past tense, I can single out my favorite example in the history of the English language. It comes from the first sentence of a Wikipedia entry: Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. Yes, smallpox was.

Strunk was born in 1869, and today's writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cognitive science, before the wave of informalization that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century.

Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology—hence the ubiquitous foreign accent.

Syntax overrides carbon dioxide.

We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.

The real principle is that between is used for a relationship of an individual to any number of other individuals, as long as they are being considered two at a time, whereas among is used for a relationship of an individual to an amorphous mass or collectivity.