Quotes About Linguistics

According to some researchers, hominids prior to Homo sapiens could not, for instance, produce the vowel i {ee}. But ultimately, this does not say very much, since by all accounts, et es perfectle pesseble to have a thoroughle respectable language wethout the vowel i.

Another area where languages often display erratic behaviour is what linguists call 'gender',

Linguistic "technology" in the form of sophisticate grammatical structures is not a prerogative of advanced civilization, but is found even in the languages of the most primitive hunter-gatherers. As the linguist Edward Sapir memorably put it in 1921, when it comes to the complexity of grammatical structures "Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam".

The conventional predictions are that within two to three generations at least half the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, especially those remote tribal tongues that are really different from what seems natural to us.

Language is mankind's greatest inventiom… that it was never invented.

The simple truth is that ll languages change, all the time - the only static languages are dead ones.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn't when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn't set in stone.

I aim to anatomise some of the linguistic horrors of our time, work out where we've been going wrong (and why), and come up with some tips and tricks to help show how, in future, we can make fewer (rather than 'less') mistakes. All right? Is 'alright' all right? You'll find out right here.

Perhaps of all the creations of man, language is the most astonishing.

To spell (from an old Germanic word) first meant to speak or to utter. Then it meant to read, slowly, letter by letter. Then, by extension, just around Cawdrey's time, it meant to write words letter by letter. The last was a somewhat poetic usage. "Spell Eva back and Ave shall you find," wrote

Gently I pointed out that it should be "sheep," and though he was so tired that he could hardly keep his eyes open, he launched into an interrogation as to why the singular should be the same as the plural and wanted to know all the other English words which had this peculiarity.

God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God.

Cinco hundred dollars. No habla español

I grew up thinking that I would be an ambassador secret agent. From age 14 to right before I graduated college, I was really interested in the foreign service and the United Nations. I learned to speak French, Turkish, and all these things.

And instead of getting a pepper-and-salt effect, we find very clear and sharp divisions between the dialects of the United States, which are getting more different from each other as time goes on.

I'm a professor of comparative literature, among other things, so I'm able to read in a couple of other languages, and I understand that not everyone is, not everyone can, although it is quite stunning how many people do read Spanish in the United States, but moving between languages is also extremely helpful.

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.

At the same time we overlap, because, I do linguistics, and Ben did a first degree in Linguistics at Lancaster University, so he knows some of my subject.

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.

I went to Briar Cliff College initially, and then I transferred to Georgetown University, because I was a Russian major, and I was one of two girls accepted that year. This was September 1969 - well, that would have been 1970 - into the School Of Languages And Linguistics in Georgetown.

The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.

Women have a greater verbal capacity.