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
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. — Ferdinand De Saussure
Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures. — Jean Piaget
Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language. — Roman Jakobson
Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going. — Rita Mae Brown
Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing. — Claude Levi-Strauss
Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing. — Claude LeviStrauss
Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it. — David Crystal
A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. ... Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind. — Wade Davis
Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like. — David Crystal
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics. — Ferdinand De Saussure
Language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly. — Kató Lomb
Short Linguistics Quotes
It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. — Noam Chomsky
As many languages you know, as many times you are a human being — Tomas Garrigue Masaryk
Knowledge never springs from faith. It springs from doubt. — Humayun Azad
Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood. — David Crystal
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence. — George Steiner
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element. — Derek Walcott
Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession. — Roman Jakobson
My linguistics is pretty theoretical. — Noam Chomsky
Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics. — Roman Jakobson
Everything is Greek, when it is more shameful to be ignorant of Latin. — Juvenal
Linguistics Image Quotes
What Is Language Quotes
The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are. — Ludwig van Beethoven
The world is not the most pleasant place. Eventually, your parents leave you and nobody is going to go out of their way to protect you unconditionally. You need to learn to stand up for yourself and what you believe and sometimes, pardon my language, kick some ass. — Queen Elizabeth II
A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language. — Noam Chomsky
But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously. — Julio Cortazar
It gives a message to people of love... it does not matter what's the colour of your skin, what language do you speak, what religion do you believe in. It is that we should all consider each other as human beings and we should respect each other. — Malala Yousafzai
What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language. — Miuccia Prada
Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside? — Jackson Browne
Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience. — Dale Carnegie
What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself — Amin Maalouf
One of my big philosophies is that fighting is the sport that crosses all borders. I don't care what color you are, what country you come from or what language you speak, fighting is in our DNA. We get it and we like it. — Dana White
Language Development Quotes
A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. — Ada Lovelace
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. — Edsger Dijkstra
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. — Martin Fowler
Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development — David Crystal
When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience. — David Antin
Code never lies, comments sometimes do. — Ron Jeffries
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. — Richard E. Pattis
One’s visual language is not something that manifests overnight. It develops organically over a life-time. The shifts can be so subtle as to be virtually imperceptible and, at times, will come to fruition so rapidly, and with such force, that the profundity is all-consuming. That is life’s work. — Dan Winters
The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late. — Seymour Cray
Language Acquisition Quotes
Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom. — Roger Bacon
As a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellence with one tongue. — Roger Ascham
We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression. — Charles Taylor
What is a nation without a mother tongue? — Jack Edwards
A masculine education cannot spare from professional study and the necessary acquisition of languages, the time and attention which I have bestowed on the compositions of my countrymen. — Anne Seward
A masculine education cannot spare from professional study and the necessary acquisition of languages, the time and attention which I have bestowed on the compositions of my countrymen. — Anna Seward
A man reacheth not to excellence with one language. — Roger Ascham
Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed. — Chuck Thompson
In fact, by universal grammar I mean just that system of principles and structures that are the prerequisites for acquisition of language, and to which every language necessarily conforms. — Noam Chomsky
I never taught language for the purpose of teaching it; but invariably used language as a medium for the communication of thought; thus the learning of language was coincident with the acquisition of knowledge. — Anne Sullivan Macy
Human Language Quotes
We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race. — Kofi Annan
There is only one caste... the caste of humanity. There is only one religion... the religion of love. There is only one language... the language of the heart. — Sathya Sai Baba
In my games I have sometimes found a combination intuitively simply feeling that it must be there. Yet I was not able to translate my thought processes into normal human language. — Mikhail Tal
The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior. — Lev S. Vygotsky
Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’ — Eleanor Roosevelt
In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods. — Edward Hirsch
Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes. — Oliver Sacks
Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people. — Leon Trotsky
Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help. — Thomas Keating
I think human beings have evolved to appreciate narrative, in the same way that we have evolved to learn language. What is narrative, after all, but a kind of super-language, where stories, like words, are ways of encapsulating information? — Alex Epstein
English Language Quotes
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. — Ronald Reagan
The basis of any independent government is a national language, and we can no longer continue aping our former colonizers ... those who feel they cannot do without English can as well pack up and go. — Jomo Kenyatta
Many people do not know that Jesus did not speak Latin or English or Hebrew; he spoke Aramaic. But nobody knows that language. So we're talking about the Bible itself being a translation of a translation of a translation. And, in reality, it has affected people's lives in history. — Ngugi wa Thiong'o
In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English? — Marlene Dietrich
I can fluently speak five languages: English, emoji, sexting, sarcasm and sass. — Tyler Oakley
I was wondering why I was put in prison for working in an African language when I had not been put in prison for working in English. So really, in prison I started thinking more seriously about the relation between language and power. — Ngugi wa Thiong'o
We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. — Booker T. Washington
Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language. — H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
FEAR is an acronym in the English language for 'False Evidence Appearing Real'. — Neale Donald Walsch
My favorite three words in the English language are: ’I don’t know’, because every time I say them, I learn something new. — Timothy Leary
English Grammar Quotes
This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America. — William Labov
Only in grammar can you be more than perfect. — William Safire
Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them. — Robert Graves
I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on thesimple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad. — Bernadette Devlin
Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. — Bill Bryson
English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common. — Bill Bryson
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. — E. B. White
As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning. — Frederick Lenz
Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar. — Robert Breault
Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason. — Richard Chenevix Trench
Most of the problems of the world stems from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence. — Shams Tabrizi
It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism. — Noam Chomsky
Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning. — Laura Mulvey
The interests of the deaf child and his parents may best be served by accepting that he is a deaf person, with an elaborate cultural and linguistic heritage that can enrich his parent's life as it will his own. — Harlan Lane
Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures. — Jean Piaget
Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations. — Edward Sapir
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
Still, Lenin personally also forced through the deportation in fall 1922 of theologians, linguists, historians, mathematicians, and other intellectuals on two chartered German ships, dubbed the Philosophers’ Steamers. GPU notes on them recorded: “knows a foreign language,” “uses irony.” — Stephen Kotkin
It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone. — Ferdinand De Saussure
The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition. — Marilyn Hacker
If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone. — Alfred Korzybski
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan
Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award. — Elfriede Jelinek
What is usually called 'intelligence' refers to the linguistic and logical capacities that are valued in certain kinds of school and for certain school-like tasks. It leaves little if any room for spatial intelligence, personal intelligences, musical intelligence, etc. — Howard Gardner
A captured pirate was brought before Alexander the Great. “How dare you molest the sea?” asked Alexander. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied, and continued: “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor. — Noam Chomsky
Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher. — Marvin Minsky
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
I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism. — P. D. James
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born. — Aldous Huxley
...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional "victims" who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime. — Gad Saad
There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. Thereis therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. — Donald Davidson
No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism. — Edward Sapir
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
The culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse population of Indian and Pakistani-administered Jammu and Kashmir has been unable to reach a consensus on the future of the land and the heterogeneous peoples of the state. — Nyla Ali Khan
English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies. — Roy Blount, Jr.
Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word "Frisco", which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of High Misdemeanour, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars. — Emperor Norton
I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less - filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt. — Daniel Keyes
Linguistics is a good way of defining the culture of a brand. The vocabulary used by sports and lifestyle brands - running, fitness, training, motorsports - is all about functionality, whereas the vocabulary of the luxury business - handbags, ready-to-wear - is all about the product. — Francois-Henri Pinault
I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless. — Richard Rodriguez
Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms. — Rudolf Carnap
Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks-- admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve. — Henry Miller
You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures. — Gao Xingjian
Impulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing. — Henry David Thoreau
In Conclusion
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