Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Linguistics. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Linguistics Quotes And Sayings by 89 Authors including Edward Sapir,Ludwig Wittgenstein,Jan Morris,Henry Sweet,Munia Khan for you to enjoy and share.
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.
Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.
The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.
Intended to serve as an introduction to both the linguistic and also the practical study of spoken English.
Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language
The question is whether distinct cognitive structures can be identified, which interact in the real use of language and linguistic judgments, the grammatical system being one of these. Certainly,
Everything is language.
Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture
Grammar has qualities, shapes and forms.
Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.
Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent.
Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
The most lasting thing from my linguistics education is SpecGram..
The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.
Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.
Language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability can not be derived.
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.
Language disguises thought.
Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.
I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
Language, as symbol, determines much of the nature and quality of our experience.
Language can be used to so many diverse ends. It can be used to clarify and, of course, it can be used to obfuscate, confuse, evade ...
Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.
Language is the house of Being.
Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.
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.
Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.
We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.
There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind
Language isn't about the words. It's about the transfer of meaning.
A parsimony of words prodigal of sense.
To perceive how language works, what pitfalls it conceals, what its possibilities are, is to comprehend a crucial aspect of the complicated business of living the life of a human being.
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
The language we use is extremely powerful. It is the frame through which we perceive and describe ourselves and our picture of the world.
Language is the light of the mind.
Language can do what it can't say.
Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.
Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.
Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.
Language helps form the limits of our reality.
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
Grammar is the analysis of language.
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.
Language is memory and metaphor.
The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.
Language is how we hack other people's brains. It's how we make them see things the way we want them to see them.
The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.
Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations.
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today's heritage and our new compositions to the future.
There is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language.
Language is magic: it makes things appear and disappear.
Language conveys a certain power. It is one of the instruments of domination. It is carefully guarded by the superior people because it is one of the means through which they conserve their supremacy.
The language is perpetually in flux: it is a living stream, shifting, changing, receiving new strength from a thousand tributaries, losing old forms in the backwaters of time.
Language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories.
Language is generated by the intellect and generates the intellect.
Psychology ideally means giving soul to language and finding language for soul.
the brain of a child learning a language can cope with a mind-boggling amount of linguistic complexity.
We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.
We think in one language and feel in another.
Language is an archaeological vehicle ... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
For most people, language is our primary interface with each other and with the external world.
English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language, we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new meanings, and we borrow new words from any language that intrudes into our intellectual environment.
Language is the medium of our thoughts.
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.
Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
Language lives in the mind, moves around with the tongue and gets its meaning in action!
Different languages cut the world into different slices.
Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.
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.
Because language and society are so closely linked, it is possible, in some cases, to encourage social change by directing attention towards linguistic reflections of aspects of society that one would like to see altered.
Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.
People banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, but a code it is, to which linguists are currently devoting articles.
Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
The diversity of language alienates man from man
In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.
Languages, like our bodies, are in a perpetual flux, and stand in need of recruits to supply those words that are continually falling, through disuse.
Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.
Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.
I am only describing language, not explaining anything.
All I know about grammar is its infinite power.
Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.
A feast of languages
Language is where the tongue fails itself over & over again.
The language in which we express our ideas has a strong influence on our thought processes.
And language, ( ... ) is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what seperates thought from nonthought, what seperates the human from the non human.
Language is the means by which we negotiate our relationship with time.
The destructive potential of language is contained within the very nature of representation. Words, particularly nouns, force an infinite of unique objects and processes into a finite number of categories.
Language is unique in that there are no other animals with which we converse, no matter what language we are speaking. And yet the miracle of this research has been the realization that what is unique from one perspective may be constructed of mostly old parts from another.
The topics which language limits us to aren't much worth discussing in the first place.
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
The philosopher caught in the nets of language.
A crassly arbitrary method can be avoided only when it is accepted that etymological statements are historical and not authoritative and that semantic statements must be based on the social linguistic consciousness related to usage.
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.