Quotes About Linguistics

and although the W came along in the tenth century, modern Germans still seem to manage perfectly well by using a V instead. Except when the German managing director of Aston Martin tries to say 'vanquish'.

Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.

He had never really mastered English, but he'd studied enough to have a healthy fear of its random severity, the senseless brutatlity of its conjugations; it was unpredictable, like a cross-bred dog.

she loathed all the IM and texting abbreviations and acronyms. She was a snob like that

Ci sono tantissime cose che continuano a confondermi in italiano. Le preposizioni, per esempio.

So che non è possibile conoscere una lingua straniera alla perfezione. Non a caso, ciò che mi confonde di più in italiano è l'uso dell'imperfetto rispetto al passato prossimo.

To translate is to alter one's linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile.

L'inglese e l'italiano sembrano i punti più vicini. Avendo in comune molte parole di origine latina, condividono un certo territorio. Inutile dire che mi capita spesso in italiano di incontrate una parola che conosco già grazie all'equivalente inglese. Non posso negare che la mia comprensione dell'inglese mi aiuti. Ma può ingannarmi.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

I've studied Chinese in college, but basically, I'm not bilingual.

I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

I have always loved languages, I have studied basic French and Japanese too.

In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

Intended to serve as an introduction to both the linguistic and also the practical study of spoken English.

I'm studying Finnish, and it's one of the five most difficult languages in the world. And the more I learn, the more I realize that's definitely true.

The way the educational system in Russia works is studying a foreign language is part of the program, so by the time you get to the age of 10, you pick up another language. I speak a bit of Russian, a bit of English, a bit of Spanish a bit of French.

I had to do a lot of studying 'cause I had to learn new languages all the time. So it was a little bit painful watching other kids play outside, and I'm stuck at home learning something.

So Mandarin, I picked it up, I spent a year in Beijing studying but then when you don't use it, languages, you just kinda forget it all.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.

Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.