Quotes About Linguistics

above all, simplify the French language and abolish irregular verbs – a measure that would have rescued countless schoolchildren from the despotism of pernickety pedagogues.

morphological

Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, "I am sad," or "I am happy". They understood what we English have long forgot. We're not our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

how the word janitor came from Janus, the god of entrances and exits,

Examples of elision in Mexican Spanish abound—pa' instead of para (for), apá instead of papá (father), SanTana instead of Santa Ana, pos instead of pues (well), and my supposed gaffe.

Thomas loved words, particularly if he didn't understand them.

Really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is – it's only that it renders the speech of the 16th century.

fluent speech, there are no real spaces between words, so when two words frequently appear together they can easily fuse into one.

Gender thus provides our second example of how the mother tongue influences thought.

there is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages.

the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson encapsulated Boas's insight into a pithy maxim: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express—for in theory any language could express anything—but in what information each language obliges it speakers to express.

Much of a language's complexity is not necessarily for effective communication.

The wheels of language run so smoothly that one rarely bothers to stop and think about all the resourcefulness and expertise that must have gone into making it tick. Language conceals its art.

how modern Hebrew has recently coined a rather recherché template, the passive of the reflexive ('he was made to snog himself'),

within two to three generations at least half the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared,

Subordination is a syntactic process that is often touted (by syntacticians, at least) as the jewel in the crown of language, and the best example for the ingenuity of its design: the ability to subsume a whole clause within another.

For just like the rainforests and the coral reefs, the languages of the world are vanishing. At an estimated death-rate of one language every two weeks, it seems that before this century is out, between half and three-quarters of the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, and among them almost all the languages of small preliterate societies.

The real differences between languages, he argued, are not in what a language is able to express but rather in "what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.

word that is not actively used by one generation will not be heard by the next generation and will then be lost forever.

There are many languages that don't make a distinction between green and blue and treat these as shades of one color.

The parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages.

Some languages, for example, have a gender distinction that is based only on "animacy," the distinction between animate beings (people and animals of both sexes) and inanimate things.

Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue.