Quotes About Linguistics

I dunno, I don't speak caveman

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

Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve.

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.

I love the musicality of English. French sounds flat. In English, you can play with pitch.

At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.

schwa : The faint vowel sound in many unstressed syllables in the English language. It is signified by the pronunciation uh and represented by the symbol upside down e. For example, the e in overlook , the a in forgettable , and the o in run-of-the-mill . It is the most common vowel sound in the English language.

The Hopewell, too, built mounds, and like the Adena seem to have spoken an Algonkian language.

glottochronology

In our tongue we would say alfär.

So is language change progress or degeneration? It is neither, of course. To assert that language change is for the better or worse requires some measure of what good or bad language is, and the issue of language change needn't come into question here. But no coherent criterion has ever been given: upon examination, the pronouncements of the self-appointed pundits are always a mix of cultural biases, half-understandings of languages, and an obvious compulsion for telling people what to do.

he—I do wish somebody would think up a new collective pronoun—

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

Of course you cannot compare my Hindi with a Hindi-speaking person, but I am confident enough to hold a conversation in mixed Hindi-English.

What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.

Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary.

The Levant, the land to the east of the Mediterranean, is almost without doubt the region in which the 'Semitic' family of tongues originated, and Arabic has preserved, pristine, many of the earliest features of those tongues.

There are no such things as synonyms! he practically shouted. Deluge is not the same as flood.

Incidentally, he might have added, are you aware that there's no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural.

I remind my American readers that biscuits in England and Australia are crispy flat things such as you call cookies, and the soft doughy things you call biscuits are what we call scones. And they say we speak the same language…

Padre always told me me language was sulphurous.

I hate all these crazy verbs, using a subjunctive to get what's happened in the future and the past mixed up.