Quotes About Linguistics

I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s.

the power of language

the former free-floating with vowels, the latter fortressed by consonants.

Nu exist? limbi moarte, ci numai creiere în letargie.

and spaghetti was busgetti

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic. I also just have a good feeling for how words are made and formed in English and the etymologies that give you prefixes and suffixes.

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'

I was in love with metaphors and similes and alliteration, just the play on the words. I was fascinated with that concept.

In my mind, if you went back to the Middle Ages, in Italy they'd be speaking Middle Age Italian. And at that point, it would obviously be indecipherable for us, but for the people of that time, it was just normal talking.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

Another linguistic accident: an unholy marriage of Greek terminology filtered through Latin. That sort of thing begets monsters.

And so she went on, galloping through thickets of diphthongs, searching—I was sure—for the sound that would not disgrace her husband, and failing at every turn.

Japanese staff who claim not to know a word of English beyond "awesome" and "sucks", which for a vast range of human endeavour, actually, is more than enough…

The English language is damned difficult, but it's also damned rich, and so clear and bright that you can search out the darkest places with it.

categories are more difficult to learn than others. Nouns seem to be the easiest; adverbs—the most difficult; verbs and adjectives—somewhere in between" (p. 298).

Knowing a word can also mean that the learner knows the frequency of occurrence of that word. Though this aspect of a word may seem almost trivial, the frequency of a word is often cited as a major factor in a given word's difficulty. In fact, Haynes (1993) claims that word frequency is probably the major component in word difficulty.

collocation(s) of a new vocabulary item. The meaning of collocation is apparent in its constituent parts: co (together) + location (place). A collocation is a word or phrase that naturally and frequently occurs before, after, or very near the target vocabulary item.

vocabulary is actually more important than grammar.

Vocabulary knowledge is critical to any communication. Wilkins (1972) summarizes the situation best: "While without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed" (p. 111).

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the first word you thought of.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

The way I see it is, I am a boon to the English language.