Quotes About Linguistics

A double negative is a no-no.

If the English language had been properly organised by a businessman or Member of Parliament, then there would be a word which meant both "he" and "she", and I could write, "If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis", which would save a lot of trouble.

I always put the apostrophe in "ain't" to make certain I'm using proper improper English.

Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.

the subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses.

The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, ). The alphabet was invented only once.

What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

Middle English is an exciting field - almost uncharted, I begin to think, because as soon as one turns detailed personal attention on to any little corner of it, the received notions and ideas seem to crumple up and fall to pieces - as far as language goes, at any rate.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

I know Sanskrit, which has similarities with Tamil, so it helps me understand the language.

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.

We have this wonderful language and we don't appreciate it. That's old-fashioned me, but when I went to school, everyone had elocution lessons, not to sound posh but so you could be understood.

There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.

For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.

It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.

What I want is for people to really grab hold of language and not be nervous about it. 'The Word Spy' is all about diving in and playing with words.

Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.