Linguistics Quotes Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.

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.

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.

Impulse is, after all, the best linguist;

its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.

Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?

When words come out of politician's mouth that are linguistically incorrect, people see it reflecting their intelligence. Sarah Palin was called out for "refudiate," which seemed to combine refute and repudiate. One favourite Bushism was "misunderestimate."

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".

True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love.

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

Through the act of translation we break out of linguistic confinement and reach many other communities.

The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately UNDERSTOOD by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.

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.

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

If the English educated neglect, as they have done and even now continue, as some do, to be ignorant of their mother tongue, linguistic starvation will abide.

Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience.

I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

In the law, rights are islands of empowerment.

. . . Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images, either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society.

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy.

It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.

Not being categorized is like keeping your mouth shut.

Categorization is linguistic, people trying to understand each other. Words are misty, language is a fog. I want to be in as many boxes as possible, describe myself as thickly as possible.

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.

The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes 'forms of life ' for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all. It hardly matters whether such an inquiry is called philosophy or sociology.

In a way, the blank canvas... represents the infinity of trying to use color to express emotions - to assign a linguistic function to color.

Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.

So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it - the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology.

Everything is Greek, when it is more shameful to be ignorant of Latin.

Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.