Quotes About Linguistics

I believe language is infinitely malleable, a live being in our hands, which deserves our great respect and curiosity

In fact, some theories of language development suggest that humans learned to dance and sing before we could talk, that music was actually the first human language.

mostly unsuccessful attempts to teach grade-school children English using transformational grammar were made during the 1960s and early 1970s. Today it is taught mostly in colleges and graduate schools. Outside linguistics, transformational grammar is used mostly in computer-language-processing applications. It has an alien look and feel to traditionalists, but it can convey interesting insights into how the language works

Not until 1761 did any grammarian settle on the eight that became the canonical parts of speech in English. He was the same man who discovered oxygen: Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). In his Rudiments of English Grammar, he listed these: • noun • adjective • pronoun • verb • adverb • preposition • conjunction • interjection15

I'm not trying to stump anybody... it's the beauty of the language that I'm interested in.

the English of the nineteenth or early twentieth century is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today. The use of a noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable, and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation. My use of contemporary language—rather than the English of a generation or two ago—is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient.

Language belongs, not to the academics, but those who use it

Only Celts would use nine letters to make one sound.

Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue.

I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of 'New York Jewish conversational style'. That was my dissertation.

I used to spell everything phonetically, or I would have little tricks for words I could not figure out.

I sing in Hungarian. I read Hungarian. I do not pretend to speak Hungarian, but I sing in languages that I have studied as languages. And I find that to be central and very, very helpful. I think if you're not really cognizant of what every single word means, I think that might be a little tricky.

Learning the Italian was tough. I tried to really come at from a purist perspective, really learn the grammar, syntax and conjugations.

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

Actually, languages can be very tricky in this respect. The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive but none in which a double positive makes a negative—to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, "Yeah, yeah.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

Why isn't the word "phonetically" spelled with an "f"?

Whose cruel idea was it for the word "lisp" to have an "s" in it?

Why are they called buildings when they're already finished? Shouldn't they be called builts?

This was what he enjoyed most; a game of words.

At Sussex University, I developed a system called WinLocX to help with the process of translating software into foreign languages.

The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else.