Linguist Quotes

I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language... in that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians... To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar. (Max Müller)

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

AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN.

Ezra Pound

Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist.

Wallace Stevens

Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of our speech recognition system goes up.

Fred Jelinek

Harold Waring, like many other Englishmen, was a bad linguist.

Agatha Christie

Who wants to be a linguist must apply consistently linguistic criteria, not tinkering to comply with policy needs, creating the illusion that one stands still in the field of science.

Snježana Kordić

His was the variegated and distinguished career of the eminent jurist, scholar, educationist, author and linguist. During his life span of four score and seven years symbolised significant achievement at each important stage, bringing honour and glory not only to himself but also to the institutions which he served and to our country.

Mohammad Hidayatullah

Despite these shortcomings, the insights into the organization of grammar that were achieved in Cartesian linguistics remain quite impressive, and a careful study of this work can hardly fail to prove rewarding to a linguist who approaches it without prejudice or preconceptions as to the a priori limitations on permitted linguistic investigation.

Noam Chomsky

I'm no linguist, but I have been told that in the Russian language, there isn't even a word for freedom.

Ronald Reagan

Semantics (semasiology) is a branch of linguistics. The questions which are of particular interest in this connection are - with what is that branch of linguistics concerned, and in what does it see the distinction between itself and the semantic problems found in contemporary logic.
To begin with the term itself: it comes from the eminent French linguist Bréal and is genetically connected with linguistics. In the late 19th century Michel Bréal published his Essai de semantique. Science des significations. (Adam Schaff)

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

For example, the great linguist Panini gave the concept for meta-language-and constructed one-thousands of years before computer scientists began exploring the same idea. No one has been able to match him to this day.

Pāṇini

The subject matter of linguistics comprises all manifestations of human speech, whether that of savages or civilized nations, or of archaic, classical or decadent periods. In each period the linguist must consider not only correct speech and flowery language, but all other forms of expression as well. And that is not all: since he is often unable to observe speech directly, he must consider written texts, for only through them can he reach idioms that are remote in time or space.

Ferdinand de Saussure

To a linguist, the phenomenon is familiar: the euphemism treadmill. People invent new "polite" words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotations. "Water closet" becomes "toilet" (originally a term for any body care, as in "toilet kit"), which becomes "bathroom," which becomes "rest room," which becomes "lavatory." ... The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name.

Steven Pinker

(Dr. Paul Johns, animal linguist, on cats) It seems their entire language consists of two phrases, uttered with varying degrees of intensity: "Hurry that dinner, willya" and "Everything here is mine."

Nicole Hollander

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

Moses Mendelssohn

I am a terrible linguist. It`s a great shame that I have not learnt Urdu and Persian.

William Dalrymple (historian)

Sanskrit has many words for the horse: aśva, arvant or arvvā, haya, vājin, sapti, turanga, kilvī, pracelaka and gho ṭ aka, to name the most prominent among them. And yet, the Dravidian languages show no trace of having borrowed any of these words; they have their own words kudirai, parī and mā [...] The Santali and Mundari languages, however, have preserved the original Kol- Munda word sādom. Not only has no linguist ever claimed that the Dravidian and Kol-Munda words for horse‘ are borrowed from 'Aryan‘ words, but in fact some linguists have even sought to establish that Sanskrit gho ṭ aka, from which all modern Indo-Aryan words are derived, is borrowed from the Kol-Munda languages.

Shrikant Talageri