Quotes About Linguistics

scholars tell us that there was no word in ancient Latin or Greek for "self" as it is understood in contemporary usage.

in which great difficulties are found to the present day by Englishmen, whose language presents no certain laws for rendering any given sound into a fixed combination of letters.

Krashen's insistence that a sheltered classroom consists of second language learners only.

the Comprehension Hypothesis,12 elaborated by Stephen Krashen in the early 1980s. It holds that one factor above all is responsible for second language acquisition: comprehensible input in that language.

Noam Chomsky pointed out, the number of possible sentences is infinite in any language; there is no limit to the grammatical combination of words. Behaviorism cannot explain how, after relatively limited exposure to a mother tongue, young children acquire complex syntactic structures and begin to produce "correct" utterances never heard before, by themselves or by others. What's more, they accomplish these amazing intellectual feats without being explicitly taught.

Even the word salary came from the Latin salarium, which meant the amount a soldier was paid to buy salt.

I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.

One's thought patterns become different...when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.

One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

Fou!" "Who?" "I didn't say 'who'; I said 'fou,' " "I know you did. I said who?" "Who?" "Who's fou?" "Oh, is. By Jove, 'suis'! 'Je suis fou.

The professional interpreter is a minor miracle—far better

Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs.

IT CAN HARDLY be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports

Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.

This was a big divergence from the way human children learn language, and that itself was interesting.

Did you know that research on gorillas has shown that they communicate using gestures? Now listen to this. An ASL-like language may very well have preceded spoken language in human development. A kind of language with gestures and vocalizations. Gradually the vocalizations took over from the gestures, because it's so much more convenient to speak than gesture.

I believe that we humans, in teaching chimpanzees and gorillas ASL, stumbled upon a natural communication system already in use. We just enhanced it. This is just my opinion and I wouldn't dare put it in a paper.

Our modes of speech are bred in the bone, madam. We cannot escape them any more than we can the colour of our eyes.

Then there was that absurd syntax business again. No language without syntax. Well, what about Latin! These assholes didn't even know Latin! Where did these guys go to school?

He didn't sing the language the way the French did, enjoying every word.

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

I don't know what an interrobang is." "It's a glyph that combines a question mark and an exclamation point.