Quotes About Linguistics

My writing is about connecting ways of talking to human relationships. My purpose is to show that linguistics has something to offer in understanding and improving relationships.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

My Hindi is OK. I think I am better with Tamil. I remember the Tamil words.

There's a convention in English stuff that if something is more than 100 years old, people have to say 'do not' instead of 'don't. They have to say 'will not' instead of 'won't.' People are speaking in a way that is not accessible or normal. And people didn't ever speak like that.

Online, you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet.

My opinion is that more languages you speak, better it is, but when you come to America, you speak English.

Sanskrita, "polished, complete." Sanskrit is the elder sister of all Indo-European tongues. Its alphabetical script is called Devanagari; literally, "divine abode." "Who knows my grammar knows God!" Panini, great philologist of ancient India, paid that tribute to the mathematical and psychological perfection of Sanskrit. He who would track language to its lair must indeed end as omniscient. 2

The symbol "&" was a logogram—literally a picture representing a word. While many people assumed the symbol derived from the English word "and," it actually derived from the Latin word et. The ampersand's unusual design "&" was a typographical fusion of the letters E and T—the ligature still visible today in computer fonts like Trebuchet, whose ampersand "" clearly echoed its Latin origin.

For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo.

She does speak Bengali, doesn't she? Morrow had asked over the phone. Sure, I'd said. Actually, Amrita spoke Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and a little Punjabi as well as German, Russian, and English, but not Bengali.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Mahnmut hield niet van Frans - het voelde als een te dikke olie tussen zijn tandwielen - Maar het zat wel in zijn database, dus kon hij het vertalen.

had been Mirandized. And a perfectly good adjective had been made into a verb.

I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less-filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt.

Help! Why is Wednesday spelled like that?

The farther back we trace the Egyptian language the more affinities it reveals with the Semitic tongues of the Near East.

I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.

staggering out of Language, into language

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

The past tense of "921 is

She learned about Indian words that have been incorporated into American English, like moose and pecan and squash, and Penobscot words like kwai kwai, a friendly greeting, and woliwoni, thank you.

An idiom is a set phrase of two or more words that means something different from the literal meaning of the individual words.

In the meantime, the works of Gordon, Lupyan, and others suggests that words are not just convenient labels for things; rather, they are extremely powerful mental devices.

Indeed, humans won't speak or produce language unless they are taught to do so, which means that our remarkable capacity doesn't amount to much at all if someone isn't there to provide a model for how to use it.