Quotes About Linguistics

I'm not very good at standard English.

For Cantonese - because there's no standardized pinyin system - I have to have someone read it to me, and then I rewrite the whole script in my own Cantonese pinyin.

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

A man who can speak two languages is worth two men.

Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.

English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results.

Why is abbreviation such a long word?

It seems that in almost all societies, the attitudes that people have to language change is basically the same. People everywhere tend to say that the older form of a language is in some sense 'better' than the form that is being used today.

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.

Ah! The English language was a wonderful thing! You could always find the right word. He only wished he could speak the language.

I stop listening when academics start mixing their Greek and Latin roots. That never leads anywhere productive.

How had it come about that these particular designs were chosen as our letters? Who decreed what sound would accompany each shape? And how was it decided the manner they would come together to form a word? 'Why is this so?' I demanded to know.

Oxford philosopher John Austin pointed out that saying, "I promise," is a whole different linguistic deal

I'm a bit nerdy about accents. I love it.

I remember my jaw would hurt because I wasn't used to speaking English all the time. Like how, even if you exercise, you'll play kickball one day, and then you're like, 'Wait, I run, but new places are hurting because I don't use my muscles this way.' My mouth was not used to making these sounds.

The other day, I was taking part in an audience Q&A when I was roundly scolded by a woman for 'allowing the BBC to ruin the English language.' Naturally I felt terrible, as I had no idea either that it was happening or that I was responsible.

How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just have to put a fuck.

But enough already of what grammarians will recognize as the third conditional: if + pluperfect + would.

If there wasn't an English word for it, though, then it was probably work best avoided, at least until she was really desperate. The

The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

There are any number of questions that might lead one to undertake a study of language. Personally, I am primarily intrigued by the possibility of learning something, from the study of language, that will bring to light inherent properties of the human mind.