Linguist Quotes

#1. The American punctuation rule sticks in the craw of every computer scientist, logician, and linguist, because any ordering of typographical delimiters that fails to reflect the logical nesting of the content makes a shambles of their work.

Steven Pinker

#2. I'm no linguist, but I have been told that in the Russian language, there isn't even a word for freedom.

Ronald Reagan

#3. Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated.

Bill Bryson

#4. Impulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.

Henry David Thoreau

#5. To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.

Stewart Brand

#6. I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

Clive James

#7. We decipherers cannot afford to be as picky as the linguist, who can always run back to a native speaker for a few more forms.

E. J. W. Barber

#8. I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

Moses Mendelssohn

#9. I was just the one who upgraded her software and made sure that nothing broke down. If anyone was equipped for the job, it was me, the professional computational linguist.

Elizabeth Bear

#10. You are the language
so universal
you are forgotten

Be my linguist

Turn me
into your words.

Banoo Zan

#11. It was an epiphany when I realized you don't have to call yourself a linguist, a translator, a poet. You can call yourself an artist and you can do all these things.

Jan Peacock

#12. A linguist who specialised in the languages of incense and burnt offerings, of moths and radial cremations.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

#13. As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.

John McWhorter

#14. linguist called Alla who advised us, among other things, to treat our more stupid students with sympathy, "as if they had cancer." While

Elif Batuman

#15. A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as "E is dense in itself".

John Edensor Littlewood

#16. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

David Crystal

#17. As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

Larry Wall

#18. To money, the finest linguist in the world!

Minna Antrim

#19. A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.

Roman Jakobson

#20. I feel such a difference between a philologist/linguist and a linguaphile as, say, a choreographer and a ballerina.

Kato Lomb

#21. You might be a cunning linguist, but I am a master debater.

Donald Rumsfeld

#22. People have a habit, in the age of cameraphones and social networking, of being a bit too quick to turn all sorts of experiences into a 'memory'.

Tom Cox

#23. It's very different when you're reading a script to when you're watching a movie for the first time.

Maisie Williams

#24. Not being ambitious of martyrdom, even in the cause of gastronomical enterprise, especially if the instrument is to be a contemptible, rank-smelling fungus, I never eat or cook mushrooms.

Mary Virginia Terhune

#25. I come back home almost every weekend, or my wife comes up every other weekend to Vancouver. So, in that sense, we make it work. It's just a great city. It's a great country. They've been good to me, and I have no problems being up there.

Michael Trucco

#26. I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.

Rita Dove

#27. Why is a man with a knife after your blood? Who sent him? I would like to write the fellow a letter of thanks!

Elizabeth Peters