Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields: the study of language form, of language meaning, and of language in context.

Quotes

• It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.
  • Noam Chomsky, NOORDERLICHT TRANSCRIPT DE SPRAAKVERWARRING (May 31, 1998).

• Jede Sprache is ein System, dessen sämmtliche Theile organisch zusammenhängen und zusammenwirken.
  • Translation: Every language is a system all of whose parts interrelate and interact organically.
  • Georg von der Gabelentz, Die Sprachwissenschaft, ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisheringen Ergebnisse (1901). Leipzig: Weigel, p. 481.

• [C]haque langue forme un système où tout se tient.
  • Translation: Every language forms a system in which everything is interconnected.
  • Antoine Meillet, Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes (1903). Paris: Hachette, p. 407.

• [C]haque fait linguistique fait partie d'un ensemble où tout se tient.
  • Translation: Every linguistic fact is part of a whole in which all parts are interrelated.
  • Antoine Meillet, La méthode comparative en linguistique historique (1925). Paris: Champion, p. 12.

• La langue est un systéme dont toutes les parties peuvent et doivent être considérés dans leur solidarité synchronique.
  • Translation: Language is a system in which all the parts can and should be considered from the viewpoint of their synchronic interrelatedness.
  • Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916), Part 1, Ch. 3, sec. 3. Paris: Éditions Payot, 1995, p. 124.

• אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט
  • Translation: A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
  • Max Weinreich

• “The long dispute about the reliability of this ‘linguistic paleontology’ is not yet finished, but approaching its inevitable end - with a negative result, of course.”
  • Stephan Zimmer, On Indo-Europeanization” in the Journal of Indo-European Studies, Spring 1990. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• Glottochronology is a methodological deadlock.
  • Harald Haarmann: “Basic’ vocabulary and language contacts: the disillusion of glottochronology”, Indogermanische Forschungen, 1990, p.35.

Example sentences

• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
  • Illustrating a meaningless but grammatical sentence.
  • Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton. pp. 15. 

• Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
  • Illustrating ambiguity.
  • Misattributed to Groucho Marx; first recorded on Usenet group net.jokes in 1982: Bill Banze (1982-09-07). "<bnews.mork-cb.130> Time flies...". net.jokes. (Google Groups). Retrieved on 2009-08-31. See also Fred R. Shapiro, (2006). The Yale Book of Quotations, p. 498, in which the earliest appearance of the saying is attributed to the net.jokes post. Shapiro gives the post's date as 9 July 1982, transposing the day and month of the Usenet post.

• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
  • Illustration of homonyms and homophones.
  • William J. Rapaport, 1972, reported in William J. Rapaport, "A History of the Sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." (22 September 2006; accessed 23 September 2006) (archived copy).

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 460.

• Besides 'tis known he could speak Greek
  As naturally as pigs squeak;
  That Latin was no more difficile
  Than to a blackbird 'tis to whistle.
  • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I (1663-64), Canto I, line 51.

• A Babylonish dialect
  Which learned pedants much affect.
  • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I (1663-64), Canto I, line 93.

• For though to smatter ends of Greek
  Or Latin be the rhetoric
  Of pedants counted, and vain-glorious,
  To smatter French is meritorious.
  • Samuel Butler, Remains in Verse and Prose, Satire, Upon Our Ridiculous Imitation of the French, line 127. A Greek proverb condemns the man of two tongues.

• I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
  Which melts like kisses from a female mouth.
  • Lord Byron, Beppo (1818), Stanza 44.

• * * * Philologists, who chase
  A panting syllable through time and space
  Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
  To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.
  • William Cowper, Retirement, line 691.

• He Greek and Latin speaks with greater ease
  Than hogs eat acorns, and tame pigeons peas.
  • Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex, Panegyric on Tom Coriate.

• Lash'd into Latin by the tingling rod.
  • John Gay, The Birth of the Squire, line 46.

• Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.
  • He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst und Alterthum.

• Small Latin, and less Greek.
  • Ben Jonson, To the Memory of Shakespeare.

• Omnia Græce!
  Cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine.
  • Everything is Greek, when it is more shameful to be ignorant of Latin.
  • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), VI, 187. (Second line said to be spurious).

• Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, The Characters or Manners of the Present Age (1688), Chapter XII.

• C'est de l'hebreu pour moi.
  • It is Hebrew to me.
  • Molière, L'Etourdi, Act III, scene 3.

• Negates artifex sequi voces.
  • He attempts to use language which he does not know.
  • Persius, Satires, Prologue, XI.

• This is your devoted friend, sir, the manifold linguist.
  • William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well (1600s), Act IV, scene 3, line 262.

• Away with him, away with him! he speaks Latin.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II (c. 1590-91), Act IV, scene 7, line 62.

• O! good my lord, no Latin;
  I'm not such a truant since my coming,
  As not to know the language I have liv'd in.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VIII (c. 1613), Act III, scene 1, line 42.

• But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.
  • William Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar (1599), Act I, scene 2, line 287.

• Speaks three or four languages word for word without a book.
  • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1601-02), Act I, scene 3, line 28.

• By your own report
  A linguist.
  • William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590s), Act IV, scene 1, line 56.

• Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!
  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic, Act I, scene 2.