Linguistics Quotes

There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome. ~ Mark Twain

Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was. ~ Ogden Nash

The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural. The artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents
this artifact is mimicked in a more or less ludic manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable: something like chess. ~ Roland Barthes

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

The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the 'external' elements of linguistics from the 'internal' elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis. ~ Noam Chomsky

To deny access to translation and interpreting services oppresses human rights and violates laws. ~ Nataly Kelly

How is it that you can read this book? An obvious answer is because you know English. An equally obvious answer is because the light is on. These two explanations for an apparently trivial ability can illuminate a fundamental dichotomy: the difference between our knowledge of language and our use of that knowledge; between our competence and our performance. Your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary of English, your competence as a speaker of English, is prerequisite to your understanding this sentence; the exercise of this competence is made possible by the fact, among many others, that the light is on. ~ Neilson Voyne Smith

The Devil fights from behind barricades of linguistic complexity, but the war of words will be won by those armed only with simplistic truths ~ Dean Cavanagh

Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. ~ Tristan Tzara

As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue. ~ Nataly Kelly

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

One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70) ~ Jerry A. Fodor

Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, but no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write. ~ Charles Darwin

We believe that information is an enlightening agent, but I can assure you it is not. We consume information, but we can't read. We forgot how to sit down and engage the dense layers of a text. We are so busy devouring information that we forgot how to dance with ideas. We confuse linguistic bits of data for knowledge and ideas. I can assure you, gentlemen, they are not the same. Ideas require effort and the kind of sensibility that engages the subtle layers of meaning. What the hell does information require? ~ R.F. Georgy

It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some ancient languages had altered very little and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading, isolation, and state of civilisation of the several co-descended races, and had thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees of difference between the languages of the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue. ~ Charles Darwin

Astronomy is not the science of all objects with mass and weight and velocity. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Biology is not the science of all objects that consume and excrete and have inherited characteristics. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Linguistics is not the study of all possible symbols or symbol systems. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. ~ Randy Allen Harris

And another thing: because she and my father were very ideological people, always doing things from the body of principle and dogma of the Communist Party, there was a time when I thought that italic writing was Communist. It's not. ~ Michael Rosen

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English. ~ Steven Pinker

The power of impulses which haunt our phantasies, of imaginary modes of being which ignite the poetic word, and of the all-embracing, that most powerful something which menaces us so long as we feel unloved, in all these registers and perhaps in others as well, the dialectic of power and form takes place, which insures that language only captures the foam on the surface of life. ~ Paul Ricoeur

I felt that blush in my chest as we talked stupid talk never quite revealing our queerness to each other but somehow wordlessly generating volumes of desire like some kind of sublanguage that makes you want to splash into it even with all its tensions. ~ David Wojnarowicz

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

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

At the same time we overlap, because, I do linguistics, and Ben did a first degree in Linguistics at Lancaster University, so he knows some of my subject. ~ David Crystal

The 'science' in 'science fiction' isn't just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. ~ Ann Leckie

Finally, I would like to point out that now in the age of English, choosing a language policy is not the exclusive concern of non-English-speaking nations. It is also a concern for English-speaking nations, where, to realize the world's diversity and gain the humility that is proper to any human being, people need to learn a foreign language as a matter of course. Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English – those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language – would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position – and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to be come a universal language used in every corner of the world English became that language not because it i ~ Minae Mizumura

To discuss endlessly what silly people mean when they say silly things may be amusing but can hardly be important. ~ Bertrand Russell

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

Noam Chomsky, in particular, says flatly and often that he has very little concern for language in and of itself; never has, never will. His driving concern is with mental structure, and language is the most revealing tool he has for getting at the mind. Most linguists these days follow Chomsky's lead here. ~ Randy Allen Harris

The careful scholarship of the dedicated amateur mycophile R. Gordon Wasson reads like an exciting scientific detective story. Moreover, his willingness to pursue the quest through the wide range of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology, and prehistory constitutes an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man. ~ Weston La Barre

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

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

Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people. ~ Matthew McConaughey

The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life. One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. "What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE," Sam told him. "It's not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself. ~ Mary Doria Russell

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other. ~ Ferdinand De Saussure

Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex - pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51. ~ Sam Kean

An inseparable complement to the exoticism in his stories is the erudition, the bits of specialized knowledge, usually literary, but also philological, historical, philosophical, or theological. This knowledge, which borders on but never oversteps the bounds of pedantry, is quite freely flaunted. But the point is not to show off Borges's wide acquaintance with different cultures. Rather, it is a key element in his creative strategy, the aim of which was to imbue his stories with a certain colorfulness, to endow them with an atmosphere all their own. In other words Borges's learning by his use of exotic settings and characters fulfills an exclusively literary function, which, in twisting the erudition around and making it sometimes decorative, sometimes symbolic, subordinates it to the task at hand. In this way Borges's theology, philosophy, linguistics and so forth, lose their original character, take on the quality of fiction, and, becoming part and parcel of a literary fantasy, are turned into literature. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa

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

What the innate apparatus of the mind contributes is a set of abstract conceptual frameworks that organize our experience-space, time, substance, causation, number, and logic (today we might add other domains like living things, other minds, and language). But each of these is an empty form that must be filled in by actual instances provided by the senses or the imagination. As Kant put it, his treatise "admits absolutely no divinely implanted or innate representations....There must, however, be a ground in the subject which makes it possible for these representations to originate in this and no other manner....This ground is at least innate." Kant's version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version that is most viable today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskyan linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain specificity. One could go so far as to say that Kant foresaw the shape of a solution to the nature-nurture debate: characterize the organization of experience, whatever it is, that makes useful learning possible. ~ Steven Pinker

I should think a dead language would be rather boring, socially
speaking. ~ Sol Luckman

General editors' preface The growth of translation studies as a separate discipline is a success story of the 1980s. The subject has developed in many parts of the world and is clearly destined to continue developing well into the twenty-first century. Translation studies brings together work in a wide variety of fields, including linguistics, literary study, history, anthropology, psychology, and economics. This series of books will reflect the breadth of work in translation studies and will enable readers to share in the exciting new developments that are taking place at the present time. ~ Lawrence Venuti

Then again, it'd taken more than two hundred years after the invention of the scientific method before any Muggle scientists had thought to systematically investigate which sentences a human four-year-old could or couldn't understand. The developmental psychology of linguistics could've been discovered in the eighteenth century, in principle, but no one had even thought to look until the twentieth. So you couldn't really blame the much smaller wizarding world for not investigating the Retrieval Charm. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

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'. ~ Jakub Marian

No satisfactory historical linguistic study was carried out before the beginning of the nineteenth century, and accordingly linguists had to develop appropriate methods for the new field. Like other new sciences, historical linguistics then looked to those that had developed useful methods. The greatest help came from comparative anatomy. ~ Winfred P. Lehmann

If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story? ~ T.C. Boyle

Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. ~ Bill Bryson

Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator. ~ Nataly Kelly

Take language, one of the few distinctive human capacities about which much is known. We have very strong reasons to believe that all possible human languages are very similar; a Martian scientist observing humans might conclude that there is just a single language, with minor variants. The reason is that the particular aspect of human nature that underlies the growth of language allows very restricted options. Is this limiting? Of course. Is it liberating? Also of course. It is these very restrictions that make it possible for a rich and intricate system of expression of thought to develop in similar ways on the basis of very rudimentary, scattered, and varied experience. ~ Noam Chomsky

In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word ("good", for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not. ~ Neil Postman

The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once. ~ John Sinclair

All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility. ~ Bill Bryson

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

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective. ~ Mark Twain

Only by the aid of language does reason bring about its most important achievements, namely the harmonious and consistent action of several individuals, the planned cooperation of many thousands, civilization, the State; and then, science, the storing up of previous experience, the summarizing into one concept of what is common, the communication of truth, the spreading of error, thoughts and poems, dogmas and superstitions. The animal learns to know death only when he dies, but man consciously draws every hour nearer his death; and at times this makes life a precarious business, even to the man who has not already recognized this character of constant annihilation in the whole of life itself. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. ~ William Jones

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

Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and events in great part shaped by the very language in which we describe them? When we try to describe one person to another or to a group, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job
no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being. ~ Cleanth Brooks

With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another's style of consciousness inflects one's own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It's why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover's apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise stu ~ Lisa Robertson

Lies, fictions and untrue suppositions can create new human truths which build technology, art, language, everything that is distinctly of Man. The word "stone" for instance is not a stone, it is an oral pattern of vocal, dental and labial sounds or a scriptive arrangement of ink on a white surface, but man pretends that it is actually the thing it refers to. Every time he wishes to tell another man about a stone he can use the word instead of the thing itself. The word bodies forth the object in the mind of the listener and both speaker and listener are able to imagine a stone without seeing one. All the qualities of stone can be metaphorically and metonymically expressed. "I was stoned, stony broke, stone blind, stone cold sober, stonily silent," oh, whatever occurs. More than that, a man can look at a stone and call it a weapon, a paperweight, a doorstep, a jewel, an idol. He can give it function, he can possess it. ~ Stephen Fry

What the survival of threatened languages means, perhaps, is the endurance of dozens, hundreds, thousands of subtly different notions of truth. ~ Mark Abley

The study of universal grammar is a joint venture between globetrotting theoreticians who worry about impossible grammars and laboratory experimentalists who put young children through these impossible grammars. Perhaps, as in physics, one of these days there will be a grand unified theory of universal grammar. Linguistics today is where physics was in the age of Galileo and Kepler. The collection of principles may one day be replaced by one powerful principle - perhaps just the principle of recursion. that underlies them all. Universal grammar is still waiting for its Newton and Einstein. Whatever it turns out to be, its job its to keep children on the right track to their language. ~ Charles Yang

Linguistics is our best tool for bringing about social change and SF is our best tool for testing such changes before they are implemented in the real world, therefore the conjunction of the two is desirable and should be useful. ~ Suzette Haden Elgin

A theory of reality must not only explain reality, but also knowledge about that reality because knowing reality is part of reality. ~ Ashish Dalela

(...) this first-approximation reification of language very easily passes over unnoticed into a harder idealization, especially in everyday parlance. It is this idealization that, for instance, leads people to say that "the language" is degenerating because teenagers don't know how to talk anymore (they were saying that in the eighteenth century too!). It is also behind seeing the dictionary as an authority on the "correct meanings" of words rather than as an attempt to record how words are understood in the speech community. Even linguists adopt this stance all the time in everyday life (especially as teachers of students who can't write a decent paragraph). But once we go inside the heads of speakers to study their own individual cognitive structure, the stance must be dropped. ~ Ray S. Jackendoff

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

Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. - Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. ~ Clarice Lispector

So, what did you want to watch?'

'Thought we might play a game instead,' he said, holding up a familiar dark green box. 'Found this on the bottom shelf of your DVD cupboard … if you tilt the glass, the champagne won't froth like that.'

Neve finished pouring champagne into the 50p champagne flutes she'd got from the discount store and waited until Max had drunk a good half of his in two swift swallows. 'The thing is, you might find it hard to believe but I can be very competitive and I have an astonishing vocabulary from years spent having no life and reading a lot – and well, if you play Scrabble with me, I'll totally kick your arse.'

Max was about to eat his first bite of molten mug cake but he paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth. 'You're gonna kick my arse?'

'Until it's black and blue and you won't be able to sit down for a week.' That sounded very arrogant. 'Really, Max, Mum stopped me from playing when I was thirteen after I got a score of four hundred and twenty-seven, and when I was at Oxford, I used to play with two Linguistics post-grads and an English don.'

'Well, my little pancake girlfriend, I played Scrabble against Carol Vorderman for a Guardian feature and I kicked her arse because Scrabble has got nothing to do with vocabulary; it's logic and tactics,' Max informed her loftily, taking a huge bite of the cake.

For a second, Neve hoped that it was as foul-tasting as she suspected just to get ~ Sarra Manning

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. ~ Samuel R. Delany

Sound is the hard currency; meaning is the network of cultural and formal conventions that turns it into a stick of gum at the
candy store. ~ Randy Allen Harris

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

A metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression (a form of words) used for artistic or rhetorical purposes; instead, it is a process of human understanding by which we achieve meaningful experience that we can make sense of. A metaphor, in this "experiential" sense, is a process by which we understand and structure one domain of experience in terms of another domain of a different kind. ~ Mark Johnson

Buttressing this argument (that you can prevent children from learning to read or ride bicycles but you can't stop them from learning to talk), Chomsky had pointed to two other universals in human language: that its emergence in children follows a very precise timetable of development, no matter where they live or which particular language is the first they learn; and that language itself has an innate structure. Chomsky has recently reminded audiences that the origins of the structure of language - how semantics and syntax interact - remain as "arcane" as do its behavioral and neurologic roots. Chomsky himself finds nothing in classical Darwinism to account for human language.* And for that reason, says Plotkin, linguistics is left with a major theoretical dilemma. If human language is a heritable trait but one that represents a complete discontinuity from animal communicative behavior, where did it come from? ~ Frank R. Wilson

Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians ~ Russ Rymer

firstly, what "really" attracted me to Indo-European, as well as to English, Polish, and Russian philology, wasn't the seductive variety of linguistic forms, or the infinitely picturesque accidents that fill the histories of words and dialects, but rather the fact that these obey lays that can be rigorously described, and that these laws, such as Grimm's Law in Germanic philology, or the principles of Slavic palatalization, which lie behind all those wonderful alveolar fricatives in Russia and the Auvergne, promised to submit the irresistible and etrnal movement of languages no longer to mere chance, but to something that closely resembled calculation;
- and that, secondly, and consequently, the noblest aspect of linguistics (and if I had been familiar with Trouetzkoy's phonology and with Jakobson, this conclusion would have been even more obvious) was its power of deduction -- but that there remained something even nobler, which was the terrain of pure deduction, in other words, mathematics. And that it is why I absolutely had to become a mathematician. ~ Jacques Roubaud

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

We mathematicians are used to the fact that our subject is widely misunderstood, perhaps more than any other subject (except perhaps linguistics). ~ Keith Devlin

The [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind. ~ Steven Pinker

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

We live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux. ~ David Foster Wallace

A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock? ~ Steven Pinker

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

Sending someone all of the possible birthday party emoji is extra festive: great! But sending someone all of the possible phallic emoji (say, the eggplant and the cucumber and the corncob and the banana) is NOT extra sexxaayy: that's a weird salad. ~ Gretchen McCulloch

A proof becomes a proof after the social act of accepting it as a proof. This is true of mathematics as it is of physics, linguistics, and biology. ~ Yuri Manin

Remember that lettuce doesn't grow on a spruce; and it also doesn't rhyme with it. ~ Jakub Marian

The most lasting thing from my linguistics education is SpecGram.. ~ Trey Jones

The current President's verbal abuse of language itself - with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he's serving, he's always serving meaninglessness. ~ Rebecca Solnit

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

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

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

In order for such integration to succeed [i.e. integration of all subdisciplines], probably everyone will have to endure some discomfort and give a little. We cannot afford the strategy that regrettably seems endemic in the cognitive sciences: one discovers a new tool, decides it is the only tool needed, and, in an act of academic (and funding) territoriality, loudly proclaims the superiority of this tool over all others. My own attitude is that we are in this together. It is going to take us lots of tools to understand language. We should try to appreciate exactly what each of the tools we have is good for, and to recognize when new and as yet undiscovered tools are necessary. ~ Ray S. Jackendoff

For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs. In practice, the study of language is in some degree or other the concern of everyone. But a paradoxical consequence of this general interest is that no other subject has fostered more absurd notions, more prejudices, more illusions, or more fantasies. From a psychological point of view, these errors are of interest in themselves. But it is the primary task of the linguist to denounce them, and to eradicate them as completely as possible. ~ Ferdinand De Saussure

The fact that early languages, no matter how many there are, utilize the same streams implies that the brain doesn't have a native language. The brain can only reflect the fact that a set of neural circuits was built and activated for a certain period of time. Nor does the brain care if those neural circuits map onto things that the rest of the world calls languages or dialects. It really cares only about what activates those circuits. Thus, the brain patters that typify language use across skill levels can be mapped.

Brain imaging technology monitors the intensity of oxygen use around the brain - higher oxygen use represents higher energy use by cells burning glucose. The deeply engrained language circuits will create dim MRI images, because they are working efficiently, requiring less glucose overall. More recently acquired languages, as well as those used less frequently, would make neural circuits shine more brightly, because they require more brain cells, thus more glucose. ~ Michael Erard

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since. ~ Noam Chomsky

Possible explanations for talented language learning fall into two general areas. One view says: What matters is a person's sense of mission and dedication to language learning. You don't need to describe high performers as biologically exceptional, because what they do is a product of practice. Anyone can become a foreign-language expert - even an adult. (...) The other view says: Something neurological is going on. We may not know exactly what the mechanisms are, but we can't explain exceptional outcomes fully through training or motivation. ~ Michael Erard

The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather "opens things up to the light of Heaven" by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to "illumine," for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over. ~ Hakim Bey