Quotes About Linguistics

Most of the best programmers I know are also very fluent in their mother's tongue, and typically in other languages as well.

It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.

Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn't bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Every letter in the alphabet in that sentence.

He kept saying weird things to me in Elizabeth English." "Like what?" Christina asked. "Like 'Me thinks I never forget a face,'" Mimi said. "Me thinks that makes no sense," said Grant.

Webster's dislike of words that weren't pronounced the way they looked led him to decree that words such as centre and theatre should be spelled center and theater; he also dropped the silent u from words such as colour, favour and honour. In fact, Webster was single-handedly responsible for most of the differences between British and American spelling that survive to this day.

strange, the Hebrew noun which means "I am", The English always use to govern damn.

You should be careful when using these endless words. An acquaintance of mine once was fortunate enough to discover the most impressive word notalgia for back-ache. Mistakenly, however, he declared in a large company: 'I have such a nostalgia.' 'Oh, you want to go home to Nizhne-Novgorod?' asked his most sympathetic hostess. 'Not at all,' he answered. 'I just cannot sit down.

We must know words not as abstract grammatical and logical quantities, but as animated and social beings. Roots, inflections, word-book definitions, are products of the decomposition of speech, not speech itself. They are dead remains, stripped of their native attachments and functions, and hence it is that a living Danish scholar, himself a man of rare philological attainment and of keen linguistic perceptions, calls scholastic grammar 'the grave of language.

Besides, good swearing is used as a form of punctuation, not necessarily a response to pain or insult, and is utilized by experts to lend a sentence a certain zest, like a sprinkling of paprika.

Everything always comes down to language in the end.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Since the concepts people live by are derived only from perceptions and from language and since the perceptions are received and interpreted only in light of earlier concepts, man comes pretty close to living in a house that language built.

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

The Englishman loves to roll his tongue around the word, 'extraordinary'. It so pleases him that he is reluctant to finish the sound which goes on into harmonics and overtones. The North American publisher is likewise inclined.

You have to fall in love with hanging around words.

The grossest thing in our gross national product today is our language. It is suffering from inflation.

remembering that human beings cannot produce 20,000 unique sounds, even if you were to include belching and hawking great globs of phlegm (which I think counts in Chinese), the linguistic powers that be--whoever they are--threw in tones, possibly to ensure that no foreigner over the ages of thirty would have any chance whatsoever of understanding that Chinese language.

The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.

I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly.

Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like 'I was sat' instead of 'I was sitting', which just sounds so ugly.

The best scheme of Phonetics is a stiff uncertain thing.