Quotes About Linguistics

One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.

The Greek word for "rooster" is built from combined parts that mean "getter out of bed".

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

Le langage est, en effet, l'instrument même de la pensée, et le seul moyen de lui donner des contours fermes.

The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

Jack," said Charles, "he's making up words again." "Yes," Jack replied, "but he's getting better at it, don't you think?

In Spain, for instance, where the Visigoths ruled for more than two hundred years, there is not a single building left to illustrate their architecture, just as scarcely a word in the Spanish language can be traced back to their tongue.

For example, the resemblance between the word for "bride" and the verb meaning "to steal away" in Indo-Germanic languages is taken as evidence of marriage by capture in early times

Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides.

I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end.

He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says.

Ninguna palabra está completa / ni siquiera en alemán que las tiene tan grandes.

The language of the lowlanders was in fact much closer to northern English

Persons, bodies and minds inhabit language.

In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say 'top' and 'bottom' - we said 'pitcher' and 'catcher'...

Albanian dogs go "ham ham." In Catalan, dogs go "bup bup." The Chinese dogs say "wang wang," the Greek dogs go "gav gav," the Slovenians "hov hov," and the Ukrainians "haf haf." In Iceland, it's "voff," in Indonesia, it's "gong gong," and in Italian, it's "bau bau.

In Spanish, the word esposas means both 'wives' and 'handcuffs'.

Pedants should be aware that the English name for the world's highest mountain should be spoken aloud as EEV-uh-rest, not EV-uh-rest.

Zischeln is a useful German verb meaning "to whisper angrily.

What is literally the most misused word in the English language? The word 'literally' has been used to mean its opposite for over 200 years.