Quotes About Linguistics

En la península ibérica el latín se partió en dos troncos que los lingüistas han denominado iberorromance y occitanorromance. Del primero proviene el castellano, el portugués, el gallego y el asturleonés. Del segundo el catalán, el valenciano, el aragonés y el occitano.

Ay, si hoy viviera Cuervo y oyera en lo que se convirtió esto! ¡Wow! «Wow» es la interjección de asombro que está hoy de moda. La tomaron del inglés. Suena como un perro ladrando. Hasta las interjecciones están anglizadas. Nos putiaron el idioma.

From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary of phonetic spellings.

This was thieves' cant. Mosca was a lover of words, and she had a sneaking liking for the grimy panache of cant, and those who wore it like a ragged red cloak.

I'll tell ya, in New York City, where I've lived far too long, 'f***' isn't even a word, it's a comma.

Accident, agree, bagpipe, blunder, box, chant, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, femininity, finally, funeral, horizon, increase, infect, obscure, observe, princess, scissors, superstitious, universe, village: those are just some of the everyday words that Chaucer introduced to the language through his poetry.

Yeah. The more languages you know the better. And I've got a knack for them. I taught myself French and it's practically perfect. Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.

Musicals are written in English, and then we import them to Japan. When we translate them into Japanese, the sounds of the language are completely different. The Japanese language is not the best for singing, in terms of sound.

English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language.

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

For me, it's a big challenge to translate everything in English.

When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate.

My favourite language, actually, is Czech, just because it's so colourful. We have so many combinations, words, and expressions. I have to say there are a lot of things which you can say in Czech, but you cannot really translate, because the meaning would make no sense.

Anyone that was raised with a Germanic language will agree that our tone is strong, especially once translated into English.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don't want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.

I have some English words on the first album, but any time I try to do it, you miss something. You think it's just a simple translation from French to English, but it's so different as far as the understanding.

Sometimes it can be difficult when you're talking to a journo after the game, saying, 'Yeah mate, I was on the burst.' And then the translator is trying to translate that into Japanese, and apparently there is no actual translation.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

I can speak Esperanto like a native.

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

What is a sentence, anyway?

At first when you're learning a foreign language, what seems strange is that a different set of words exists for the things you know. But then, after a while, what seems strange is that so many words are the same, that two entirely different peoples, an ocean apart, would choose the exact same sounds. In the end, what causes the most trouble are the words that sound the same but mean different things: déception, nostalgie, grâce.