Quotes About Linguistics

People banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, but a code it is, to which linguists are currently devoting articles.

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English?

Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport.

I haven't been abroad in so long that I almost speak English without an accent now.

Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.

If male homosexuals are called "gay," then female homosexuals should be called "ecstatic."

You speak the language far better than

An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive." - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary

If you love language, it will love you back.

Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages?" August said. "And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word.

I never met a word I didn't love

Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

Your brain doesn't process language quite like other people. Why that is, I have no idea.' 'I have a superior brain?' 'Uh,' Eliot said, 'I wouldn't go that far.'

That's a Z," I corrected, making sure to pronounce it "zee." "I'm afraid that's a zed," she counter-corrected

Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.

French: why does this language even exist? Everyone there speaks english anyway.

designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word "ampersand" didn't come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced "and." When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words "and, per se [i.e., by itself ], 'and.'" This eventually became corrupted to "ampersand." The symbol is a favorite of law and

I've been obsessed with words since I was a little girl, and I am fortunate that each week as resident word expert on 'Countdown' I am ideally placed to quiz my guests in dictionary corner about the words and phrases they use.

Speaking, writing, and signing are the three ways in which a language lives and breathes. They are the three mediums through which a language is passed on from one generation to the next.

Words are but the signs of ideas.