Quotes about Linguistics

Study a foreign language if you have opportunity to do so. You may never be called to a land where that language is spoken, but the study will have given you a better understanding of your own tongue or of another tongue you may be asked to acquire.

Ebonics is not a separate language. It is ghetto speech and substandard English. To claim that ebonics is a positive way of communicating for blacks is to condemn blacks to menial jobs and economic inferiority. A person who fails to learn correct language skills is forever handicapped in seeking employment.

To employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meanings is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change.

The parallel, rather, is with human language. It is human to have the ability to speak, an essential part of the image of God in us. Nonetheless, concrete language, which exists in countless forms, is not native but acquired; it is learned.

I will say here and now that I have never discovered, nor can I see, any reasonable use or excuse for the " waynee, weedee, weekee " convention. It is not merely that I have a profound sympathy with one of my friends who says he just cannot believe that Caesar was the kind of man to talk in that kind of way. Caesar may, indeed, have done so, but what then ?

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.

Fou!" "Who?" "I didn't say 'who'; I said 'fou,' " "I know you did. I said who?" "Who?" "Who's fou?" "Oh, is. By Jove, 'suis'! 'Je suis fou.

If you can not master your language you must be it's slave.

The Luther Bible was to the modern German language what the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible were to the modern English language. Before Luther's Bible, there was no unified German language.

There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome.

The professional interpreter is a minor miracle—far better

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.