Linguists Quotes

Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree ("Each man in their degree"). ~ John McWhorter

(If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.) ~ Jared Diamond

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

To money, the finest linguist in the world! ~ Minna Antrim

The Baron was good with two things: sex, and death. And what was sex anyway - what was orgasm but what the French (those cunning linguists of the language of love) referred to as a Little Death? What was life but a ticking clock toward the grave, and how did life start but with an unfettered hump toward morning? ~ Daniel Younger

English has a single verb "to be," which occurs in a variety of contexts. The Guyanese have three verbs for the same set of functions. Or rather two verbs plus what we linguists call a "zero form," a verb that is "not phonologically realized" and looks to the layman like nothing at all:

I am hungry = me hongry.
The boy is laze = di bai lazy.

This is typically what happens when the predicate is an adjective. If it's a noun, you get yet another a:

I am captain = me a kyapn.

However, if the predicate is an expression indicating location, de must be used:

I am in Georgetown = me de a Jarjtong.

If there is no predicate (as in Descartes' "I think, therefore I am") then the meaning must be the same as "exist," and again de is used:

God is/exists - Gad de. ~ Derek Bickerton

A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts toward "central planning," language (especially its everyday spoken form) stubbornly tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way. ~ James C. Scott

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 term used by linguists to describe what Klotz was engaging in in that moment is "mitigated speech," which refers to any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when we're being deferential to authority. If you want your boss to do you a favor, you don't say, "I'll need this by ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Muslims pursued knowledge to the edges of the earth. Al-Biruni, the central Asian polymath, is arguably the world's first anthropologist. The great linguists of Iraq and Persia laid the foundations a thousand years ago for subjects only now coming to the forefront in language studies. Ibn Khaldun, who is considered the first true scientific historian, argued hundreds of years ago that history should be based upon facts and not myths or superstitions. The great psychologists of Islam known as the Sufis wrote treatise after treatise that rival the most advanced texts today on human psychology. The great ethicists and exegetes of Islam's past left tomes that fill countless shelves in the great libraries of the world, and many more of their texts remain in manuscript form.
In the foreword of "Being Muslim. A Practical Guide" by Dr. Asad Tarsin. ~ Hamza Yusuf

In many parts of the world, you will find people of the
same ethnic group, living a few miles apart in similar valleys under similar
conditions, speaking languages that have absolutely nothing in common with each
other. This sort of thing is not an oddity -- it is ubiquitous. Many linguists
have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to
fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue?" "Has anyone come up with
an answer yet?"
"The question is difficult and profound," the Librarian says. "Lagos had a
theory."
"Yes?"
"He believed that Babel was an actual historical event. That it happened in a
particular time and place, coinciding with the disappearance of the Sumerian
language. That prior to Babel Infopocalypse, languages tended to converge. And
that afterward, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge and
become mutually incomprehensible -- that this tendency is, as he put it, coiled
like a serpent around the human brainstem."
"The only thing that could explain that is --" Hiro stops, not wanting to say
it.
"Yes?" the Librarian says.
"If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their
minds in such a way that they couldn't process the Sumerian language anymore.
Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another,
damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the bra ~ Neal Stephenson

Cryptology used to be the realm of linguists. Now it's dominated by the geeks." She said this proudly, as if she was one among them. "We're going to rule the world, you know?"
What Holly didn't understand was that when she said things like this, she didn't sound like a geek - she sounded like a Valkyrie. ~ Kresley Cole

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

Linguists aim to describe language while teachers prescribe how English or any other language should be properly used. ~ Adrian J. Williams

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

In antiquity, there were three regions in southern Europe: Greece, Rome, and Ilyria. Albanian is the only survivor of the Ilyrian languages. That is why it has always intrigued the great linguists of the past. ~ Ismail Kadare

When a general examination of the rhyme scheme in the Qur'an is
made, we see that around 80% of the rhymes consist of just three
sounds (n, m, a) consisting of the letters Alif, Mim, Ya and Nun258.
Excluding the letter "Nun," 30% of the verses are rhymed with "Mim,"
"Alif" or "Ya."

The formation of rhymed prose with just two or three sounds in a
poem of 200-300 lines may give that work an important quality, sufficient
for it to be described as a masterpiece by literary critics today.
However, bearing in mind the length of the Qur'an, the information it
contains and its wise exposition, the extraordinary manner in which its
rhymed prose system is used becomes even clearer and more beautiful.
The Qur'an indeed contains an ocean of information relating to a wide
variety of subjects. They include: religious and moral guidance, lessons
from the lives of the peoples of the past, the message of the prophets
and messengers of Allah, the physical sciences and historical accounts
of important events. But all of this, although wonderful in itself, is
delivered with the most fantastic literary rhythm and excellence. It is
simply not possible for so much rhymed prose by use of so few sounds
in the Qur'an, with its varied and knowledgeable subject matter, to be
achieved by human endeavour. From that point of view, it is not surprising
that Arab linguists describe the Qur'an as "very de ~ Harun Yahya

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

(...) 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

Some linguists say that the word Allah is based on the word waliha, which translates to a love that is so passionate and ecstatic that it completely transcends the senses. This implies that to know God we have to surrender our minds, everything we are, and everything we know in exchange for love, because self-surrender to divine love is the only path to God. ~ A. Helwa

From antiquity, Latin died but is still studied in seminaries and elite universities. So did Sanskrit in Asia. iI was replaced by Pali, but even Pali died, too. Linguists say the only ancient language which was resuscitated from the grave was Hebrew of Israel. ~ F. Sionil Jose

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas. ~ Ferdinand De Saussure

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

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 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 guardians have often blamed linguists as defenders of bad language: moral and cultural relativism is often tossed in at no extra charge. We as a profession are supposedly promoting the idea that anything goes in grammar... But no, we have never said anything goes in grammar. (...) When it comes to the proper use of language, universal grammar is the ultimate authority. It is not about what rules are deemed reasonable or popular; it is about what rules are true. And one sign for a true rule is that it appears in young children, long before they are polluted by dubious grammatical advice. ~ Charles Yang

There are as many approaches as there are families, but linguists have defined three main ones with infinite variations: The one-parent-one-language approach, the minority language at home approach, and the mixed language approach. ~ Annika Bourgogne

One of the things that is nice about these old pastors - they were young at the time - who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that. ~ John Le Carre

some linguists have also concluded that, while the innatist perspective provides a plausible explanation for first language acquisition, something else is required for second language acquisition, since it so often falls short of full success. From the cognitive psychology perspective, however, first and second language acquisition are seen as drawing on the same processes of perception, memory, categorization, and generalization. The difference lies in the circumstances of learning as well as in what the learners already know about language and how that prior knowledge shapes their perception of the new language. ~ Patsy M. Lightbown

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

If you're one of those people who worry that the English language is going to the dogs, linguists are of no help to you. Whatever it is that annoys you - double negatives, the demise of whom, the non-standard usage of literally - linguists will answer that a language is a living thing, and is always changing. You can't stop the process, so you'd better get used to it. ~ Gaston Dorren

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

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells ... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers. ~ Tony Hoare

All dogs seem to be great linguists, according to their owners. They always understand every word that's said to them. ~ Susan Ertz

The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months. ~ Tim Ferriss

I came to believe that God has reserved the office of elder for men, and I came to this conclusion not because of what my church taught or because of cultural trends but because of intense personal study of Scripture and the work of biblical scholars and linguists much wiser and more skilled than I. ~ Anonymous

Linguists holding bullhorns hollered, "A bas les Boches! A bas les Marcon! Down with the Boches! Down with the Macaronis! Vive la France!" A mortar crew with the 18th Infantry fired a special shell the size of an ostrich egg. It soared 200 feet into the night, detonated with dazzling pyrotechnic sparkle, and unfurled an American flag, which floated to earth; given a clear target at last, French gunners replied with eager fire. ~ Rick Atkinson

Language doesn't belong to grammarians, linguists, wordsmiths, writers, or editors. It belongs to the people who use it. It goes where people want it to go, and, like a balky mule, you can't make it go where it doesn't want to go. ~ Rosalie Maggio

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

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. ~ William Cowper

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

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule. ~ John Rogers Searle

Oh, those lapses, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with "errors." We could do better, but we're so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the "let it all hang out" ethos of the sixties, that we don't bother to observe the "rules" of "correct" grammar.

To a linguist, if I may share, these "rules" occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The "rules" make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.

Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not - I repeat, not - that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.

The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.

Yet, in my experience, to try to get these things across to laymen often results in the person's verging on anger. There is a sense that these "rules" just must be right, and that linguists' purported expertise on language must be somehow flawed on this score. We are, it is said, permissive - perhaps a ~ John McWhorter

Universal grammar is about what language is: it is to be distinguished from prescriptive grammars, often distilled in newspaper columns, which tell us what language should be. We are all entitled to our own opinions of what is appropriate, be it in the arrangement of words or flowers - as long as we keep in mind that these are just opinions. The properties of universal grammar linguists have unearthed, however, are a useful defense when language "authorities" try to rationalize their pontifications: none of the don'ts they advertise can be found in the book of universal grammar. ~ Charles Yang

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

To make a long story short, there is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages. It's not simply that no one has bothered to do it
it's inherently impossible even if one tried. So where does all this leave the dogma of equal complexity? When Joe, Piers, and Tom claim that "primitive people speak primitive languages," they are making a simple and eminently meaningful statement, which just happens to be factually incorrect. But the article of faith that linguists swear by is even worse than wrong
it is meaningless. The alleged central finding of the discipline is nothing more than a hollow mouthful of air, since in the absence of a definition for the overall complexity of a language, the statement that "all languages are equally complex" makes about as much sense as the assertion that "all languages are equally cornflakes". ~ Guy Deutscher