Quotes About Linguistics

an adequate theory of language as a game should distinguish between these two varieties of language, one of which is intended primarily to convey information and the other primarily to impose a point of view against a willful opposition. I do not know if any philologist has yet made the technical observations and theoretical propositions which are necessary to distinguish these two classes of language for our purposes, but I am quite sure that they are substantially different forms.

It is quite clear that if left alone, babies will make attempts at speech. These attempts, however, show their own inclinations to utter something, and do not follow any existing form of language. It is almost equally clear that if a community of children were left out of contact with the language of their seniors through the critical speech-forming years, they would emerge with something, which crude as it might be, would be unmistakably a language.

One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words. A central idea of his philosophy, the notion of a 'language-game', apparently had its genesis in this incident.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

What's more, she gives shapes to the links between words and their meanings, and then fits them into chains of her own choosing.

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

Drogi Mieczys?awie (...) czy zgodzi si? pan ze mn?, ?e cz?owiek istnieje tylko w j?zyku? Wszystko poza j?zykiem jest zwierz?ce i niezró?nicowane. To j?zyk sprawia, ?e jeste?my tym, kim jeste?my.

In fact, no real heresy could ever come about in Polish. By its nature, the Polish language is obedient to every orthodoxy.

Another language, sir? But I dare say it is much the same thing - a putain, as they say in France?

I learned to love the feel of good words.

Luckily, languages are like musical instruments: the more you know, the easier it is to pick up new ones.

What enables a child not only to learn words, but to put them together in meaningful sentences? What pushes children to go on developing complex grammatical language even though their early simple communication is successful for most purposes? Does child language develop similarly around the world? How do bilingual children acquire more than one language?

Indicate the extent to which you agree with each statement by marking an X in the box associated with your opinion: SA–strongly agree A–agree somewhat D–disagree somewhat SD–strongly disagree

learners who were given pronunciation lessons emphasizing stress and rhythm were judged to be easier to understand than learners who received lessons focused on individual sounds.

Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)

Wilma Mankiller, chief of the Cherokee Nation, submitted the eighty-five-letter Cherokee alphabet, hoping that her language would still be spoken a hundred years from now.

Based on the ideas of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this is the view that language doesn't just change minds by transferring thoughts from one head to another; it configures how people make sense of the world, including about space, time, and causality.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it. But since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves. What they call anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, is nothing but literature reappearing like the hydra's head in the very spot where it had been suppressed. The human mind will go through amazing feats to avoid facing 'the nothingness of human matters'.

The teacher who does not respect the student's curiosity in its diverse aesthetic, linguistic, and syntactical expressions; who uses irony to put down legitimate questioning (recognizing of course that freedom is not absolute, that it requires of its nature certain limits); who is not respectfully present in the educational experience of the student, transgresses fundamental ethical principles of the human condition.

But the same in the plural in ia must be. E, or i, are the ablative's ends,—mark my song, While or to the nominative case doth belong; For the neuter aforesaid we settle it thus: The plural is ora; the singular us.

How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one?

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.