Linguists Quotes

On this page you will find all the quotes on the topic "Linguists". There are currently 63 quotes in our collection about Linguists. Discover the TOP 10 sayings about Linguists!
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  • A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas...

    "Course in General Linguistics" by Ferdinand de Saussure, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, translated by Wade Baskin, New York : Philosophical Library, (p. 120), 1959.
  • When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love's adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages.

    Lying   Men   Adjectives  
    Nizar Qabbani, “Language”
  • 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.

    Art   Real   Nice  
    Source: www.pbs.org
  • Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

  • Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. 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.

    Children   Taken   Kids  
  • If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

    Interview with John Pilger on BBC's "The Late Show", November 25, 1992.
  • Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

    Art   Work   Generations  
    Edward Sapir (2014). “Language”, p.235, Cambridge University Press
  • Knowledge never springs from faith. It springs from doubt.

  • Music is a manifestation of the human spirit, similar to language. Its greatest practitioners have conveyed to mankind things not possible to say in any other language. If we do not want these things to remain dead treasures, we must do our utmost to make the greatest possible number of people understand their idiom.

  • Even if you close your eyes, you'll still hear Donald Trump sniffing. Linguists might call [these visuals] paralinguistics, every form of information including facial gestures and facial features. Obviously these things get scrutinized in tremendous detail, so that a cough can be of outsized importance. [But] that's all part of the package.

    Eye   Details   Gestures  
    Source: www.macleans.ca
  • A drone strike is a terror weapon, we don't talk about it that way. It is; just imagine you are walking down the street and you don't know whether in 5 minutes there is going to be an explosion across the street from some place up in the sky that you can't see. Somebody will be killed, and whoever is around will be killed, maybe you'll be injured if you're there. That is a terror weapon. It terrorizes villages, regions, huge areas. It's the most massive terror campaign going on by a long shot.

    Sky   Long   Drones  
  • It may be true that people who are merely mathematicians have certain specific shortcomings; however that is not the fault of mathematics, but is true of every exclusive occupation. Likewise a mere linguist, a mere jurist, a mere soldier, a mere merchant, and so forth. One could add such idle chatter that when a certain exclusive occupation is often connected with certain specific shortcomings, it is on the other hand always free of certain other shortcomings.

    Science   Hands   People  
  • I mean, it’s true, nobody talks about them, but when you bring it up, the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work there, and you built it but you don’t own it, that’s a highly unnatural notion. You don’t have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.

    Respect   Work   Mean  
    Noam Chomsky (2013). “On Anarchism”, p.109, New Press, The
  • It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

    Noam Chomsky (2010). “The Chomsky Reader”, p.60, Pantheon
  • 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.

  • It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.

  • 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.

    Editors   People   Want  
    Rosalie Maggio, The Women's Media Center (2015). “Unspinning the Spin: The Women's Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language”, p.30, Open Road Media
  • I'm no linguist, but I have been told that in the Russian language, there isn't even a word for freedom.

    United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1988). “Ronald Reagan”
  • All dogs seem to be great linguists, according to their owners. They always understand every word that's said to them.

    Dog   Owners   Said  
    Susan Ertz (1931). “The Story of Julian”, New York D. Appleton 1931.
  • My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

    "A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.
  • 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.

    Thinking   Ada   Language  
    "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting". www.perl.com. December 6, 2007.
  • Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.

  • But in reading Shakespeare and in reading about Edward de Vere, it's quite apparent that when you read these works that whoever penned this body of work was firstly well-travelled, secondly a multi-linguist and thirdly someone who had an innate knowledge of the inner workings and the mechanisms of a very secret and paranoid Elizabethan court. Edward de Vere ticks those three boxes and many more. William of Stratford gave his wife a bed when he died [his second best bed].

    Reading   Wife   Secret  
    Source: www.indielondon.co.uk
  • I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

    War   Believe   Political  
    FaceBook post by P.D. James from Oct 30, 2011
  • These microscopic organisms form an entire world composed of species, families and varieties whose history, which has barely begun to be written, is already fertile in prospects and findings of the highest importance. The names of these organisms are very numerous and will have to be defined and in part discarded. The word microbe which has the advantage of being shorter and carrying a more general meaning, and of having been approved by my illustrious friend, M. Littré, the most competent linguist in France, is one we will adopt.

  • 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.

    Study   Range   Interest  
    "Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linghuistics (1910-1911)" by Ferdinand de Saussure, Pergamon Press, www.marxists.org. 1993.
  • Last week a former Royal Marine who is the boyfriend of the model Kelly Brooks crashed into a bus stop while driving a van carrying a load of dead badgers. I mention this solely to remind you that linguists are not kidding when they say … that your command of English enables you to understand sentences that have never occurred before in the entire history of the human species.

  • Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

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

    Keys   Language   Despise  
    "The Characters or Manners of the Present Age". Book by Jean de La Bruyère, Chapter XII, 1688.
  • The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination,' we might say - exercised through the mass media.

    Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2006). “The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, The New Press
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