Quotes About Linguistics

People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars – at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language – by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

The two men spoke in German, although von Hessen, who had spent years living in Italy, could also speak Italian

His method resembles George Bernard Shaw's way of using the /f/ sound of GH in "tough," the /i/ sound of o in "women," and the /sh/ sound of TI in "nation" to write fish as GHOTI. The scribe also

Sink-searching meant I had to expand my French vocabulary yet again. There aren't just sinks in France: there are éviers, lave-mains, bacs à lave, bassins, vasques, and lavabos. Each type of sink has its own raison d'être.

Language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God.

The official language of the State of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the American language, and not the English language.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

In the history of the concept of number has been adjective (three cows, three monads) and noun (three, pure and simple), and now ... number seems to be more like a verb (to triple).

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss.

The Hebrew language will go from the synagogue to the house of study, and from the house of study to the school, and from the school it will come into the home and... become a living language

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

Whose cruel idea was it for the word "lisp" to have an "s" in it?

Why isn't the word "phonetically" spelled with an "f"?

Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who drives a racing car not called a racist?

Why are they called buildings when they're already finished? Shouldn't they be called builts?

The plural of spouse is spice.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.

It's weird the way "finger puppet" sounds okay as a noun... ladies.

If a word in the dictionary were mispelled, how would we know?

English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.

You can learn Elvish, if you want. It's a language like Italian and English. You can learn to read it, you can learn to write it, and you can learn to speak it.

Over the years, I've noticed that most of my colleagues and friends have their own favorite but relatively obscure words that even they aren't familiar with. The