Quotes About Linguistic history

With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.

Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).

It must have been the case that the natural language, Prakrit, and the vernaculars came first, while Sanskrit, the refined, secondary revision, the artificial language, came later.

The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.

Linguists had long known that Latin script—the everyday alphabet of today's Western world—evolved from Greek letters, which had themselves derived from Phoenician, as did Hebrew.6

The only languages which do not change are dead ones.

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.

He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters.

his naval namesake. He spoke German as a

las palabras nunca son fruto del azar. Que todas tienen un pasado, una especie de genética que las delata. —Eso es lo que estudia la etimología...

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.

Everything we say to each other echoes with meanings left over from our past experience— both our history talking to the person before us at this moment and our history talking to others. This is especially true in the family— and our history of family talk is like a prism through which all other conversations (and relationships) are refracted.

It is noticeable that the Phoenician terms are often shared with Ugaritic.

There have been various attempts to reconstruct the vocalization and pronunciation of classical biblical Hebrew, which certainly differs considerably from that established by the Masoretes fifteen centuries later.

Various attempts have been made, with differing degrees of success, to reconstruct pre-exilic Hebrew, including its morphology.

Language is the spiritual exhalation of the nation.

It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

A language is a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought.

The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.

According to many lexical authorities, the word that Londoners used for traders from the Hanseatic eastern cities—easterlings—became shortened and incorporated into the English language as the word sterling, with its implied meaning of solid reliability.

Bizarrely, our English word 'sturdy' may go back to the Latin turdus, thrush. Anyone described as 'sturdy' in the 1200s was wilfully reckless and possibly as immovable as a sozzled bird.

When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England.