Top 56 Language Linguistics Quotes
#1. If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.
Bill Bryson
#2. People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.
John McWhorter
#3. If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a private language argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. (In Critical Condition, p. 68)
Jerry A. Fodor
#4. I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.
Ben Lerner
#5. I should think a dead language would be rather boring, socially
speaking.
Sol Luckman
#6. To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.
Frantz Fanon
#7. Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.
David Hume
#8. I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
Mark Twain
#9. Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
Bill Bryson
#10. [Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies - with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.
Seneca.
#11. The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.
Steven Pinker
#12. The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.
John Sinclair
#14. Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.
S.I. Hayakawa
#15. Language corresponds only to itself. Intellectuals suffer from that. And once you begin to question language, you cannot stop at studying linguistics. Analytical philosophy becomes insufficient, artificial grammar becomes insufficient.
Martin Walser
#16. If there's any interaction between genes and languages, it is often languages that influence genes, since linguistic differences between populations lessen the chance of genetic exchange between them.
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
#17. As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.
Nataly Kelly
#18. In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.
Terry Pratchett
#19. In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#20. In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.
Nataly Kelly
#21. Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.
Nataly Kelly
#23. When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
#25. Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#26. Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!
Jennifer Egan
#27. Of the 193 recognized countries in the world, only politically isolated North Korea is considered monolingual.
Nataly Kelly
#28. That which is alike will be called same. That which is not same is different.
Leonard Bloomfield
#29. The only languages which do not change are dead ones.
David Crystal
#30. To deny access to translation and interpreting services oppresses human rights and violates laws.
Nataly Kelly
#31. The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.
D.T. Suzuki
#32. When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.
Noam Chomsky
#33. Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.
Jo Walton
#34. Don't you find it odd that two of the foremost symptoms of insanity are the hearing voices and talking to oneself? Is it any wonder that language is an area of such interest in psychology?
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
Mort W. Lumsden
#36. Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?
Nataly Kelly
#37. forms of printing and recording. The study of language and communication by anthropologists developed out of the European tradition of linguistics, which usually is associated with disciplines
Michael Rynkiewich
#38. The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a war, reduce a lifelong relationship to a collection of memories, or end a life.
Simon S. Tam
#39. Linguists are no different from any other people who spend more than nineteen hours a day pondering the complexities of grammar and its relationship to practically everything else in order to prove that language is so inordinately complicated that it is impossible in principle for people to talk.
Ronald W. Langacker
#40. Language was just that thing that happened when you opened your mouth at the table, squeezed a few noises out of your vocal chords, and induced Socrates thereby to pass the salt.
Randy Allen Harris
#41. How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken
light-bulb?" goes the old Lojban joke. "Two: one to decide
what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb
emits broken light.
Arika Okrent
#42. A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.
Roman Jakobson
#43. I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet.That may be. But I think there's one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren't afraid of vaccuum cleaners.
Jeff Stilson
#44. It seems that in almost all societies, the attitudes that people have to language change is basically the same. People everywhere tend to say that the older form of a language is in some sense 'better' than the form that is being used today.
Terry Crowley
#45. Remember that lettuce doesn't grow on a spruce; and it also doesn't rhyme with it.
Jakub Marian
#46. Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.
Roman Jakobson
#47. Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.
John McWhorter
#48. Ho ho ho, tell me why you are not at home' is something Santa Claus could ask you if you stayed in a hotel over Christmas. It is most certainly not the reason why it is called 'hotel', but it will hopefully help you remember that the stress is actually on the second syllable.
Jakub Marian
#49. Of village: it is not called so because its inhabitants are of higher age on average; in fact, there is no connection between the words "village" and "age" whatsoever.
Jakub Marian
#50. ( ... ) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
Steven Pinker
#51. What's "right" in language comprehension: ERPs reveal right hemisphere language capabilities" published in Language and Linguistics Compass (2008; Volume 2, pages 1-17).
Anonymous
#52. Irish and English are so widely separated in their mode of expression that nothing like a literal rendering from one language to the other is possible.
Robin Flower
#53. Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator.
Nataly Kelly
#55. Regional dialects have to become national tongues before they can attain lasting glory. As with America, as with Australia. Scottish is different because Scotland considers itself to be a nation. Its language deserves a chapter to itself.
Anthony Burgess
#56. If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.
Noam Chomsky
