Quotes About Linguistics

It turns out that, in addition to China's eight 'big' languages—Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often referred to collectively simply as 'Chinese'), with between 11 million and 800 million speakers each—China also has over 130 'little' languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers.

They had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands; the air was heav'y with th'em&.

Dil öÄŸretimini eÄŸitimin yarars?z yanlar? aras?nda saymama ÅŸa??lacakt?r; ama burada yaln?zca ilk yaÅŸlardaki öÄŸretimden söz ettiÄŸim unutulmamal?; hem ne denirse densin, hiçbir çocuÄŸun, harika çocuklar d???nda, on iki ya da on beÅŸ ya??na kadar gerçekten iki dil öÄŸrenmiÅŸ olaca??n? kesinlikle sanm?yorum.

At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it 'A Ghoti out of Water.' Ghoti, he liked to point out, could be pronounced like fish. The gh had the f sound in enough, the o had the short i sound in women, and ti had the sh sound in nation.

At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it A Ghoti out of Water. "Ghoti," he liked to point out, could be pronounced like "fish." The "gh" had the "f" sound in "enough," the "o" had the short "i" sound in "women," and "ti" had the "sh" sound in "nation." Dad

You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

I know what the structure of the language is.

We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

I'm very proud that I have learned German and Russian. Especially Russian, because of how difficult and beautiful it is and because of how much I struggled in the beginning to get my head around how it works.

I joined a organisation called Wycliffe Bible Translators that had the objective of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world, and to do that you had to study linguistics, and so that was my initial exposure to linguistics.

I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

The names of common flowers change from decade to decade, so I spent a lot of time with old outdated dictionaries, with awful flower names like 'mouse-eared chickweed.'

I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.

He spoke as if he held marbles in his mouth. 'Más o menos'--more or less--came out as 'maomay.' He was on a low-consonant diet, feasting on vowels

In English-language speech, we spend five times as much time producing vowels as consonants. In singing, that ratio can hit two hundred to one.

I've always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it's amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.

I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

Five is a Four letter word.

My name translated into Chinese is "Hy Yu"

I mean, if Native languages have no gender, then why should we? And why, for that matter, should God?

The most explicit distinguishing feature between the North American Indian languages and the European languages is that in Indian, there is no gender. In Cree, Ojibway, etc., unlike English, French, German, etc., the male-female-neuter hierarchy is entirely absent. So that by this system of thought, the central hero figure from our mythology - theology, if you will - is theoretically neither exclusively male nor exclusively female, or is both simultaneously.