Quotes About Linguistic history

The dictionary is like a time capsule of all of human thinking ever since words began to be written down. And exploring where words have come from can increase your understanding of the words themselves and expand your understanding of how to use the words, and all of this change happens in your thinking when you read the words.

African peoples were referred to as black long after the word made its appearance in the English language, so it makes no sense to retroactively impose racist connotations on to its everyday usage, and if you do, you're going to drive yourself mad and, I'm sorry to say, everyone else with you

Amma considered thanking Nzinga for informing her she was mentally enslaved, and told her that African peoples were referred to as black long after the word made its appearance in the English language, so it makes no sense to retroactively impose racist connotations on to its everyday usage, and if you do, you're going to drive yourself mad and, I'm sorry to say, everyone else with you

The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having ever been in public use under the Arsacids.

designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word "ampersand" didn't come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced "and." When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words "and, per se [i.e., by itself ], 'and.'" This eventually became corrupted to "ampersand." The symbol is a favorite of law and

The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

That a word or phrase hasn't been recorded tells us only that it hasn't been recorded, not that it hasn't existed. The

It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

we know more about how ancient Greeks and Romans sat or reclined than we do about the English of eight hundred years ago.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

Joan" was an Anglicized pronunciation of the French "Jeanne

The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, ). The alphabet was invented only once.

The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga Because it sounds like Nigger.

how the word janitor came from Janus, the god of entrances and exits,

To spell (from an old Germanic word) first meant to speak or to utter. Then it meant to read, slowly, letter by letter. Then, by extension, just around Cawdrey's time, it meant to write words letter by letter. The last was a somewhat poetic usage. "Spell Eva back and Ave shall you find," wrote

is possible, too, that OK has its origins in the Wolof waw kay. That said, the expression has also been claimed as Greek, Finnish, Gaelic, Choctaw and French; as an abbreviation of the faintly humorous misspelling Orl Korrect or of Obediah Kelly, the name of a freight agent who initialled documents he'd checked; and as an inversion of the boxing term KO (knock-out), used because a boxer who hadn't been knocked out was considered to be … well, OK.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

The English language is filled with Scandinavian words such as 'sky' and 'die', 'anger' and 'skin' and 'wing', 'law' and 'birth', 'bread' and 'eggs'.

Hravat is the Croatian word for "Croat" and it's where we get the word cravat. So Croatia means "tie land.

English had been used since the start of the seventh century to draft administrative documents,

Scrabble was invented by Nazis to piss off kids with dyslexia. This is true, they proved this one. The word dyslexia was invented by Nazis to piss off kids with dyslexia.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.