Quotes About Linguistics

Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten.

Language is the real information highway, the first virtual world. Language is the worldwide web, and everyone is logged on.

The world loses one of its six thousand languages every two weeks, and children have stopped learning half of the languages currently spoken in the world. It's been argued that languages are under greater threat than any endangered bird or mammal.

According to Fred Dick, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, all the laboratories that have tried to find a language area have been successful in that they have indeed found dozens, even hundreds, of them.

It takes at least ten years for a child to learn to coordinate lips, tongue, mouth, and breath with the exacting fine motor control that adults use when they talk.

As language is learned, it alters how we process information. Just as when we learn to identify a face with a name, it alters how we treat a face-it's not just a face, it's my friend Mike-so learning language results in our automatic labeling of objects, actions, sounds, and even more abstract categories like emotions. This labeling categorizes the item and links it to other instances of the category.

He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men. He

including the fact that 'slut' means 'ends' or 'finished'. So my new washing machine hasn't been abusing me all this time when it stopped and flashed the word 'slut' at me in bright red lights!

a French lieutenant, who had been long enough out of France to forget his own language, but not long enough in England to learn ours, so that he really spoke no language at all.

the linguist David Dalby suggests that the use of bad and wicked to convey positive rather than negative feelings originates in African languages such as Bambara, where there are 'frequent uses of negative terms … to describe positive extremes'. Dalby traces the habit of saying uh-huh to the same source.6 Another

Chinese porcelain was popular, too. The word comes from the Italian for a cowrie shell; literally, porcellana was a 'little pig', and the connection seems grounded in the glossy shell's resemblance either to a pig's back or to a sow's glisteningly crinkled vagina.35

I can remember being surprised to find that kiosk is Turkish – as may be the card game bridge – and that berserk, like geyser and narwhal, is Icelandic: it seems to derive from the name of the bearskin coats worn by the fiercest Norse warriors.

The pidgin English exclamation chop chop replicates the Chinese kwai kwai.)

Webster was a dry, humourless man whose character we can deduce, I think, from the title of his Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation.

He portrays the labours of the etymologist in whimsical terms: 'In search of the progenitors of our speech, we may wander from the tropick to the frozen zone, and find some in the valleys of Palestine, and some upon the rocks of Norway'. Johnson's

example, we can hear a note of doubt in his report that the word 'porcelain' is 'said to be derived from pour cent années; because it was believed by Europeans, that the materials of porcelain was matured under ground one hundred years'. In fact it comes from the Italian word porcellana, meaning 'cowrie shell'—a diminutive derived from the Latin porcus ('pig'), as the cowrie has commonly

Of the approximately 27,000 words identified in the OED as having first been used between 1250 and 1450, more than a fifth have French origins, and more than three-quarters of these are nouns.43 About half of all words in common use are nouns, and the introduction of new nouns – so many of them material – marks the discovery of new things, new experiences, new attitudes. Nouns

The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler.

Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.

The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.

The difficulty in making sense of even simple speech is well appreciated by computer scientists who struggle to create machines that can respond to natural language. Their frustration is illustrated by a possibly apocryphal story of the early computer that was given the task of translating the homily "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." into Russian and then back to English. According to the story, it came out: "The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.

Francois I had commanded that the French speak one tongue, and the Langue d'oil triumphed over the Langue d'oc.

The word, 'cube', comes directly from the Arabic, Kaaba.

The more deeply language is probed, the more traces it reveals of the beings that produce it.