Quotes About Linguistics

You, inquisitor, are a man who collects words. You collect mine.

In fact, the modern word 'candidate' derives from the Latin candidatus, which means 'whitened' and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters.

The Latin word for 'rams', rostra, became the name of the platform and gave modern English its word 'rostrum'.

Do you ever speak a known language? Sanskrit, perhaps?

In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme.

It's the reason we say "pork" and "beef" instead of "pig" and "cow." Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.

Within the human brain (and only the human brain), there exist specific structures responsible for the generation of our language capacities.

A degree of lying - you know, white lies - seems to be inherent in all languages and all forms of communication.

exaggeration is the octopus of the English language

The origin of language is mythic; that is, there is always a language before language, which is perception.

We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning—sedimented language and speech.

Far from being limited to the first years, language acquisition is coextensive with the very exercise of language.

The possibility of a universal grammar thus remains problematic, since language is made up of significations in the state of being born. This is the case because language is in movement and is not fixed.

They have a quick verbal exchange but only get to cover the alphabet from A to F, outdoing each other with the most choice of words.

Once again we see not only additions to the English word-hoard but new ideas being introduced or current ideas being given a name – 'humanity', 'pollute', which then, as words often do, took on a larger and more complex life. New words are new worlds. You call them up and if they are strong enough, they keep in step with change and along the way describe more and more, provide new insights, evolve on the tongue and on the page.

The Internet took off in English and although there are now fifteen hundred languages on the Internet, seventy percent of it is still in English.

There were over five hundred ways of spelling the word 'through' and over sixty of the pronoun 'she', which is quite hard to imagine.

Estuary English creeps in and shows no sign of ebbing.

English, like water, will find its own level. The language itself through usage and natural selection will see that what is survivable will survive.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim! So our English, I think you'll all agree Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

Whilst a word like "impede" survived, its opposite, "expede," did not.

English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion. Occasionally there is desperate resuscitation from a few survivors who know that to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life. Only writing preserves a language.

Word endings fell away. Prepositions came in which took the language away from the Germanic and made it more English. Instead of adding a lump on the end of words, you could use 'to' or 'with'. 'I gave the dog to my daughter.' 'I cut the meat with my knife.' The order of words became important and prepositions became more common as signposts around sentences.

Old English 'æppel' used to mean any kind of fruit.