Quotes About Linguistics

It was Mark Twain who noticed that, in German, the noun for fish is masculine, the one for fish scales is feminine, and the word for fishwife is neuter. These are the thoughts that go through

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

Before. b-e-f-o-r-e, not B4. We speak English. Not bingo.

The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.

Will America be the death of English? I'm glad I asked me that. My well-thought-out mature judgment is that it will.

When we use a language, we should commit ourselves to knowing it, being able to read it, and writing it idiomatically.

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

A lot of people think that kids say the darnedest things. But so would you if you had no education. You'd just be like, I am bike cheese. Because you wouldn't know what words were.

I'm bilingual. I speak English and I speak educationese.

I will try to dub for myself in as many languages as possible.

I was very adept at acquiring languages.

I had to know at least two languages.

I would like to speak 10 languages.

I have an interest in languages and make an effort to learn.

I pick up languages fast.

I wish I knew more languages.

I have been working in seven languages.

I learnt French in school and can already speak English.

I think I've started to dream in American a little bit.

Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?

Move beyond the educated elite, and the great majority in most countries outside Europe don't speak English.

What if the child's dependence on her twin is so great that the separation causes a mental trauma such that the damaged mind provides solace by the creation of an imaginary twin, a fantasy companion? We arrived at no satisfactory conclusion but parted with the satisfaction of having located another area of future study: linguistics.

How not to sound like a upper class man. It had been mostly a matter, I'd found, of speaking not far back in the throat but up behind the teeth, a reversal of the way I'd just painstakingly learned to speak French like a Frenchman

The language in which we express our ideas has a strong influence on our thought processes.