Quotes About Linguistics

Eu já me estou a desmulatar. (...) Eu estou é a ficar branco de língua, deve ser porque só falo português....

Learning, learned people knew, was a multilingual enterprise ["Absolute English," Aeon , February 4, 2015].

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

Appearance of "incentivize" or "incentivise" in major newspapers67 1980s 48 1990s 449 2000s 6159 2010–11 5885

When people get into their 30s plus "boyfriend" sounds weird...if you really think about it. Instead, I think we should universally start using the term "manfriend" or "snookie bookie cuddles pie".

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.

My father has a tendency to start conversations in the middle of sentences. He's also suspicious of anything modern - like nouns.

How come "burbled" gets to be in the Oxford English Dictionary but "tulgy" doesn't? Hm?

Now I had to acquire the skill of how to forget things the easiest and the fastest. Dreams are forgotten as soon as you pass through the nearest door. What remains is only the frame. But how to forget the language you dream in and grew up with?

The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, impudent ones to feed them.

Did you know that wallet in runyankole is called pocket money

They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being modifying non-being. Language, in this instance" -- and here Miriam makes a garbled noise in her throat-- "fails.

The word 'metaphor' itself can be used in a non-literal way.

'Shkoff' is to eat. 'Shkiaff' is to slap. Like, 'Gettouttahere I'm gonna give you a couple of shkiaffs ' or, 'Forget presentation, just shkiaff the food onto the plate.'

No, no," Arnie says. "Fondle--fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung..." "Farflung is Yiddish." "No," Arnie says, "it's not.

How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.

American English was different from the language she'd learned at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes.

Was there a person who existed beneath languages?

with the exception of Chinese, even the languages that originated writing, and so made the earliest use of it, have dropped their original system, and borrowed another

I was never a man of great ambition I cried too easily I didn't have a head for science Words often failed me While others prayed I only moved my lips

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.

We thus make a fundamental distinction between the competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations).

To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement o man.