Quotes About Linguistics

I love words, but I also love finding out that there is a word for something that you've experienced but didn't know there was a word for. Like 'toothpack' - that is a word for when you eat biscuits or cookies and you get that annoying layer of chewed substance on your molars that you kind of have to pick out.

I could list hundreds of words I've come up against in the course of my work that did not exist in the era of which I was writing and for which I never could find a suitably old-time, archaic or obsolete substitute.

burro, burrow: A /burro/ is an ass. A /burrow/ is a hole in the ground. As a journalist you are expected to know the difference.

Sometimes I want to suck on a beautiful word. To lick it clean.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk?

Displacement and discreteness are two fundamental properties that distinguish human language from the communication systems of birds and other animals.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

The Orkney islands and the Shetlands were in fact not surrendered to Scotland until the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English.

The English language is filled with Scandinavian words such as 'sky' and 'die', 'anger' and 'skin' and 'wing', 'law' and 'birth', 'bread' and 'eggs'.

Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English.

The argot that came to be used in the courts was known as 'Law French'. 'Master' and 'servant' come from the French. 'Crime' and 'treason' and 'felony' are French, as are 'money' and 'payment'. The

Most easily recognisable is the word raj (king) which is cognate with the Irish rí and this word is demonstrated also in the Continental Celtic rix and the Latin rex. Most Indo-European languages, at one time, used this concept. However, the Germanic group developed another word, i.e. cyning, koenig and king.

Half-familiar sounds could be dimly recognized as words through the swirls and eddies of Provençal: demain became demang, vin became vang, maison became mesong.

The fact is that none of us can unilaterally decide what a word means. Meanings of words are shared between people - they are a kind of social contract we all agree to - otherwise communication would not be possible.

Así como los seres humanos en general pueden influir en el clima, influimos en el lenguaje, y quienes lo utilizamos profesionalmente estamos obligados a cuidarlo.

Some of these words appear in metropolitan French, but a person of Saintonge who speaks the parlanjhe of the region is uniquely called a goulebenèze, literally, a happy mouth.

Also of great importance in the discovery of linguistic phenomena that led to cryptanalysis was the development of lexicography.

why is it upset? shouldn't it be downset?

x, n. Doesn't it strike you as strange that we have a letter in the alphabet that nobody uses? It represents one-twenty-sixth of the possibility of our language, and we let it languish. If you and I really, truly wanted to change the world, we'd invent more words that started with x.

There are so many words in our language; we get to know so few of them.

the common Greek term for "slave," andrapodon, "man-footed creature," was built on the foundation of a common term for cattle, namely, tetrapodon, "four-footed creature.

In France the most often used word is "connerie," which means "bullshit," and in America it's hands-down "awesome," which has replaced "incredible," "good," and even "just OK." Pretty much everything that isn't terrible is awesome in America now.

I've outlawed "meds," "bestie," "bucket list," "dysfunctional," "expat," "cab-sav," and the verb "do" when used in a restaurant, as in "I'll do the snails on cinnamon toast.

awesome," which has replaced "incredible," "good," and even "just OK." Pretty much everything that isn't terrible is awesome in America now.