By the way I also would say “I got a book.” But your teacher and I are not “English teachers” in the same sense. She has to put across an idea of what the English...

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

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.

Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert,...

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.

The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and abuse, provides, I think, almost the only specimens of words that are purely emotional, words from which all imaginative or conceptual content has vanished, so that they have no...

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

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...

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,...

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

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...

Of the 193 recognized countries in the world, only politically isolated North Korea is considered monolingual.

Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking...

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...

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

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.

If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad,...

Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?

Language has everything to do with oppression and liberation. When the word “victory” means conquer vs. harmony and the word “equality” means homogenization vs. unity in/through diversity, then the liberation of a people from a...

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.

Grammar is politics by other means.

… [In ‘Pride and Prejudice’] Mr Collins’s repulsiveness in his letter [about Lydia’s elopement] does not exist only at the level of the sentence: it permeates all aspects of his rhetoric. Austen’s point is that...

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

There’s a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact – in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality...

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...

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious...

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 language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.

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’.

The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a...

In grammar, as in war, there is strength in numbers.

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.

Don’t you find it odd that two of the foremost symptoms of insanity are the hearing voices and talking to oneself? Is it any wonder that language is an area of such interest in psychology?(attrib:...

Remember that lettuce doesn’t grow on a spruce; and it also doesn’t rhyme with it.

Language is a social art.

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...

The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in...

Of all the words that exist in any language only a bare minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are “coined” words, forms that have been in one way or another created, augmented, cut...

age” whatsoever.

I should think a dead language would be rather boring, sociallyspeaking.

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...

Before you judge me as some kind of ‘anything goes’ language heathen, let me just say that I’m not against usage standards. I don’t violate them when I want to sound like an educated person,...

[…] weil sprachliche handlungen ein gutes mittel_instrument_möglichkeit_handlungsimpuls für politisches kämpfen gegen diskriminierungen sind – weil sprachliche handlungen allgegenwärtig sind.

Ho ho ho, tell me why you are not at home’ is something Santa Claus could ask you if you stayed in a hotel over Christmas. It is most certainly not the reason why it...

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a...

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

Two: one to decidewhat to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulbemits broken light.

Language disguises thought.

Conversations are like dances. Two people effortlessly move in step with one another, usually anticipating the other person’s next move. If one of the dancers moves in an unexpected direction, the other typically adapts and...

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...