Quotes About Linguistics

Even if the rest of man's history were lost, the vocabularies, the grammars, and the literature of all his present languages would testify to a mind infinitely above the level of any other living creature's. And if some sudden mutation afflicting the progeny of the entire human race resulted in the birth of only deaf-mutes, the outcome would be almost as fatal to human existence as that of a nuclear chain reaction.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

Language makes infinite use of finite media.

I appreciate people who try and use language in an interesting way.

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.

A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

I'm not actually perishing, but I do feel like I die a little every time someone uses 'literally' to mean 'really.'

I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.

'Right' and 'wrong' aren't words a linguist uses.

Political linguists have argued that the right often uses stories to make an argument, while the left falls back on facts and statistics.

There are many bad things in this world of ours, but the use of the word 'monetize' has to rank high among them. Also, 'incentivize.' Actually, all the '-ize' words, like 'contextualize' and 'utilize' and 'prioritize.' And - this is almost too horrible to type - 'juniorize.'

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.

I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.

Until we got married, Radha didn't utter a word of English and now she won't speak Hindi. Her Hindi's pretty good actually - she learnt it while watching Hindi movies.

1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas

INVENTING A WRITING system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one. The first scribes had to settle on basic principles that we now take for granted. For example, they had to figure out how to decompose a continuous utterance into speech units, regardless of whether those units were taken as words, syllables, or phonemes. They

Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers

or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).

New Guinea, though it accounts for only a small fraction of the world's land area, encompasses a disproportionate fraction of its human diversity. Of the modern world's 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.

Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One

The UCLA historian Christopher Ehret has applied this linguistic approach to determining the sequence in which domestic plants and animals became utilized by the people of each African language family. By a method termed glotto-chronology, based on calculations of how rapidly words tend to change over historical time, comparative linguistics can even yield estimated dates for domestications or crop arrivals.

signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.

If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.)