Quotes About Linguistics

Kitai blinked slowly. Why would you use the same word for these things? That is ridiculous. We have a lot of words like that, Tavi said. They can mean more than one thing. That is stupid, Kitai said. It is difficult enough to communicate without making it more complicated with words that mean more than one thing.

The word he used was coup, and I'm not speaking French just to arouse you.

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

All I know about grammar is its infinite power.

Frankly, I wonder who Frank was, and why he has an adverb all to himself.

My English is very bad.

a Jewish convert to the Church, Henry Miller, who discovered that the entire Book of Mormon could be written on 41 pages if the Hebrew alphabet were used and on 81 pages if the ancient Semitic alphabet (sometimes called Phoenician or Old Israelitic) were used. Photographic plates of Henry Miller's translations will be found on pages 40 and 41 of J. M. Sjodahl's book, An Introduction To the Study of the Book of Mormon.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

A non-standard dialect is as valid communication system as the standard

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have.

One day is enough to master reading in Korean. Hangeul is a very scientific and convenient alphabet system for communication.

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

Computers are everywhere and you can't even begin to function with a computer unless you have comprehension and an understanding of the English language.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Jules Winnfield: ENGLISH, MOTHER FUCKER! DO YOU SPEAK IT!? Samuel L. Jackson

So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

The waters below are mayim (the Hebrew word for "water"), and waters above are sham-mayim—which some, but by no means all, scholars believe means "water there" (sham is Hebrew for "there").

So happen back fifty years, the Mohawk took and adopted the whole tribe of the Tuscarora. Don't many tribes speak exactly the same language," Myers explained. "But some are closer than others. Tuscarora's more like the Mohawk than 'tis like the Creek or the Cherokee.

I once dreamed that the word 'eight' was actually 'oat'.