Quotes About Linguistics

I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.

An offence with words is the worst offence.Word kills

The Russian verb is weak in tenses, strong in Aspects. [...] These aspects are in the very blood of the Slav. [...] These aspects I believe to be of profound psychological significance and this significance has not I think so far been fully understood.

Aspect or quality of a verb had, I believe, nothing originally to do with time; aspect in fact cuts clean across time. Aspect in most languages is now at least indicated for the most part by adverbs. I run — quickly; I stand — still; in this sense many verbs have hundreds of aspects.

I have had a suspicion all my life that in the current dictionaries and grammars often the real explanation and origin of a word or a grammatical form is to be found in something that comes in just at the end as a 'derived' form or 'exceptional' use. This I believe to be the case with the aorist; the true primitive essential aorist I believe to be the gnomic, the temporal aorist a later derivative, in fact the aorist I believe to be primarily not a tense at all but an aspect.

Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all , it has only aspects.

Las palabras de etimología desconocida, también con ‹b›.

en el sur de España aún se mantendría, en mayor o menor medida, la distinción entre /b/ y /v/.

La pronunciación de la v como labiodental no ha existido nunca en español.

A esta norma escaparon algunas palabras, ya que su uso con ‹b› y ‹v› antietimológica estaba demasiado extendido, y se consideró como la forma correcta: ‹b› antietimológica: «abogado» (del latín advocatus), «abuelo» (del latín aviolus), «buitre» (del latín vulturem), etc. ‹v› antietimológica: «maravilla» (del latín mirabilia), etc.

Por ejemplo, el español actual no admite el grupo [s] + consonante a principio de palabra, por lo que la mayoría de los hispanohablantes que no se hayan formado específicamente en ello pronunciarán el inglés still [st?l] como [es?til], es decir, insertarán una [e] para hacer la combinación de sonidos admisible, igual que es admisible «estar» [es?ta?] (del latín stare [?sta?e]); esto es un fenómeno conocido como prótesis vocálica.

Circula una etimología popular que asegura que la etimología de «testigo» (y cualquier derivado como «testamento») proviene de la costumbre que tenían los romanos de apretarse los testículos con la mano cuando juraban decir la verdad.

existe en todas las lenguas que yo conozco, las lenguas no suelen equivocarse juntas.

You say 'erbs, and we say herbs… because there's a fucking 'h' in it!

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

Young people dislike and even fail to understand our slang; my gay students ask me what "tricking" means. It's all old whore's slang, of course.

Once you locked into language, all you could do was shuffle the greasy pack of a few thousand words that millions of people had used before.

Un piccol numero di vocaboli era il materiale di tanti discorsi.

I want to understand you, I study your obscure language.

Texting has reduced the number of waste words, but it has also exposed a black hole of ignorance about traditional - what a cranky guy would call correct - grammar.

I'm about as monolingual as you come, but nevertheless, I have a variety of different languages at my command, different styles, different ways of talking, which do involve different parameter settings.

Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape.

Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language.

Of all the mediums that influence language, I think film is the one that has the most effect. Not so much from the point of view of pronunciation and grammar. I don't think we pick up very many sounds and grammatical instructions from the films we see - but the catchphrases.