Linguistics Quotes
Linguistics Quote of the day
It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
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.
when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
Linguine linguistics that left my verbal essence saucy, Send a message, leave you sleepin' next to headless horsey.
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
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.
Grammar is politics by other means.
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.
The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.
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.
In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
We mathematicians are used to the fact that our subject is widely misunderstood, perhaps more than any other subject (except perhaps linguistics).
A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.
Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was.
Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.
Pharoahe Monch is like an eloquent linguistics professor moonlighting as a rhyme serial killer terrorist, challenging the listeners' I.Q. while daring him or her to keep up.
Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
It may be a silly way, but if you remember that an owl looks like ʌ(OO)ʌ, it will perhaps help you remember that it is pronounced with something close to 'ʌoo'.
By claiming that our words are too hard to understand, the media perpetuates the idea that WE are too hard to understand, and suggests that there’s no point in trying.
Our vocabulary may become a real time algorithmic word bank. Could you imagine having a conversation like that? Where the meaning of words constantly adapts?
Often it’s not we who shape words, but the words we use that shape us.
Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.
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.
As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.
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.
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.
Why is English so widespread today, and not Danish?
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.
I should think a dead language would be rather boring, sociallyspeaking.
Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.
How many Lojbanists does it take to change a brokenlight-bulb?” goes the old Lojban joke. “Two: one to decidewhat to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulbemits broken light.
Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator.
People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.
Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.
In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.