Quotes About Linguistics

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

In the works of Shakespeare, the most wonderful genius the world has ever known, there is the enormous number of 15,000 different words, but almost 10,000 of them are obsolete or meaningless today.

There are four simple moods,—the Infinitive, the Indicative, the Imperative and the Subjunctive.

An Article is a word placed before a noun to show whether the noun is used in a particular or general sense. There are two articles, a or an and the.

subjects. Directions. CHAPTER XIII CHOICE OF WORDS

but almost 10,000 of them are obsolete or meaningless today.

A complex sentence consists of two or more simple sentences so combined that one depends on the other to complete its meaning; as; When he returns, I shall go on my vacation. Here the words, when he returns are dependent on the rest of the sentence for their meaning. A clause is a separate part of a complex sentence, as when he returns in the last example. A phrase consists of two or more words without a finite verb.

The three essentials of the English language are: Purity, Perspicuity and Precision.

the adverb as near as possible to the word it

and then tried to use it outside the classroom, you know that there are three things you must master: how the language is structured (grammar), how to name things you want to talk about (vocabulary), and the customary and effective ways

To read makes our speaking English good.

many priests and scholars can speak Sanskrit, but no one ever spoke only pure Sanskrit.

We already knew that people are good intuitive grammarians: at age four a child effortlessly conforms to the rules of grammar as she speaks, although she has no idea that such rules exist.

La linguistica gli sembrava la scienza adatta per le persone che hanno la pedanteria necessaria per la matematica, ma non l'intelligenza. Per le persone che si inventano una propria logica, secondo il bisogno.

Le lingue evolvono nel senso della pigrizia.

but there are many languages on earth that are basically gender neutral, using the same word for he, she, and it, or not using pronouns at all. You've probably heard of some of them. They include: Armenian, Comanche, Finnish, Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Quechua, Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yoruba.

The German root word for "debt" is the same as for "guilt.

A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator's mission seem so impossible.

In many circumstances, formal education replaces the infant language with one that goes on to be used in adult life as the operative means of communication.

Translation-?based language teaching is no longer in fashion, but its ghost still inhabits a number of misconceptions about what translation is or should be.

This way of dealing with an untranslatable by not translating it while making it pronounceable (sound translation, homophonic translation: see here) could be considered the primary, original meaning of the term literal translation.

Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.

the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.

It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are.