Quotes About Linguistics

There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth.

Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.

Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language.

Among human beings, vocabulary was considered the best measure of intelligence.)

We tried to trademark proximity, but you can't because it's a word

She spoke seven languages, including Mandarin and Polish, and was finishing up her master's in Intercultural Misunderstanding, which just has to be Europe's next growth industry.

The language skill in the U.S. for the most part has been awful. Many Americans don't learn any foreign language.

I like languages. I like working on different accents. I speak English, French and Spanish. I'd love to learn more but I think, as you get older, your brain is a bit slower.

In the English language, I can love my car, or my house, or my daughter, or traveling, but in Greek and how I grew up, love is described with different words.

I do love perusing the dictionary to find how many words I don't use - words that have specific, sharp, focused meaning. I also love the sound of certain words. I love the sound of the word pom-pom.

I love Russian, because it's delicious to speak like that. If you have to speak French, you can also do that, because it's not difficult. Accents are a cool thing to do. And I love doing them.

I love theater. I also love radio. I love language.

Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity

To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.

The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.

Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless).

All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.

He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, "nipple-teeth").

The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye

Our word "salary" comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, "salt money"—the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it would buy.

Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. There is something in that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity

If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon.

Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian's work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is used.

One reason chimps can't talk is that they appear to lack the ability to make subtle shapes with tongue and lips to form complex sounds.