Quotes About Linguistics

Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom.

To keep the air fresh among words is the secret of verbal cleanliness.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

The most important tool you have on a resume is language.

It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case." --

Our speech accurately reflects the prejudices of the ruling group. Since the rulers and the rich and the educated (who directed language) generally lived in cities, we developed such words as "villain," which meant a rustic; "heathen" and "pagan," which also indicated those who dwelt in the country; "boor," which meant a farmer; and many other such words which downgraded rural inhabitants.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled usTo purify the dialect of the tribe.

Today's syntax is tomorrow's morphology

Ease of learning isn't the primary force in language evolution.

Conventional languages. . . lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they're imprecise and unwieldy. They're hardly fit for speech, let alone thought.

I don't speak fluent Spanish. I took it in college.

I can speak English, Portuguese, and a bit of Spanish, or Sportugal. It's a mix of Portuguese and Spanish. I understand French and Italian, but I can't speak them.

I'm in awe of people who speak other languages not just fluently but near-native. I speak French, Spanish and Portuguese and I'm pretty good, but I'd love to understand all the nuances.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was pronouncing it 'Cal-LEE-fornia,' he was right - he just didn't realize he was accidentally speaking Spanish.

I would always talk with my friends in English and Spanglish, but it was more like slang. It was more like, 'Yo, what's up, dog?' But in Spanish, I know what's proper, and what's ghetto. I know the difference.

Well, I'm trilingual myself. I am, I know how to speak Spanish, English, obviously, and I speak pretty good Ebonics.

I must confess, my Spanish is not so good - except I read a little, so I started with the English but then determined that it would have to be in Spanish.

I speak a little Spanish but I am so impressed by people who can speak a lot of different languages.

I'm good with accents and stuff; it's mostly that I have a really good Spanish accent, so it sounds like I speak a lot better than I do.

I speak some French, Spanish, a little German and Gaelic.

I have only so many foreign-language neurons. When I learned Spanish, that displaced whatever Irish was left, and then I learned German, and that displaced the Spanish, and when I learned Serbo-Croatian, that displaced the German. So I'm a bit of a muddle.

I'm bilingual. I speak English and Spanish.

I actually speak Spanish fluently.

Actually, between Colombian and Mexican Spanish, there's not a huge difference, but it is a different accent.