Quotes About Linguistics

Alliteration seems to offend people.

English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, its shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar—the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

Ich fand nirgendwo so viel Kindheit wie in der Deutschen Sprache. Schmatzen, schnaufen, schluchzen, schlürfen: Viele deutsche Wörter klingen wie Onomatopoesie. Für die Neugeborenen klingt vielleicht jede Sprache so wie Deutsch für mich.

I never really had a strong accent.

I'm obsessed with accents.

English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

I can speak passable Mandarin. I will not be translating at the U.N. anytime soon.

Wherever it's spoken, Gaelic sounds like a combination of Swedish and Hebrew.

She said being inside a language was like being in a person's house - after a while you came to see why the teapot was where it was.

was still a fine, persistent drizzle. There was a word in Scots for it—"smirr.

The most common prepositional error is forgetting that the noun or pronoun in a prepositional phrase is the object of the preposition. The object of the preposition must be expressed in the objective case. Who can forget Jane Russell's line, in a 1970s Playtex ad, for a bra "for we full-figured gals." The preposition for mandates the pronoun us. But, then, Russell never was known for her pronouns.

Pronouns are proxies for nouns. They stand in willingly when nouns don't want to hang around sounding repetitive. The noun (or noun phrase), whose bidding the pronoun does, is called the antecedent—because it goes (ced-) before (ante-) the pronoun in the sentence or paragraph.

If all of this seems paradoxical, get used to it. Language is paradox.

The technically incorrect It's me and That's me have been part of our DNA since as long as English has been recorded. There's something nice and low-key about them. Maybe we just crave a simple English equivalent of the French C'est moi .

The long form of the possessive pronoun replaces the noun. completely.

Hey dawg, wassup?" he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as the lisp that everybody in medieval Spain had to adopt after the king developed a speech impediment.

In Shakespeare's time only about .8 percent of the world's population could speak English; today about 20 percent can. Shakespeare was lucky: a rising tide lifted his posthumous boat.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

All the kids are learning different languages. I asked them what languages they wanted to learn, and Shi is learning Khmai, which is a Cambodian language; Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Mad has taken to German and Russian, Z is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.

Did you know, ma'am, that our mutual friend can say "kiss my arse" in six languages?

She's never met an adjective or adverb she didn't like.

The Cockney accent was almost impenetrable. *Nothing* was "nuffin," and aitches were dropped from and attached to the wrong words, and some of the vowels seemed to have arrived from another planet.