Quotes of: Linguistics Keyword

The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any wars, nor to have reduced the frequency with which...

Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to Our Future

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

Matthew McConaughey

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Course in General Linguistics

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.

Roman Jakobson

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

Roy Blount, Jr.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

Ferdinand de Saussure

As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.

John McWhorter

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.

Alfred Korzybski

Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.

Roman Jakobson

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

Robert Morgan

Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.

Robert Fripp

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 all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teac...

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language

There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.

Peter Capaldi

Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.

David Crystal

I mean, I have moments of huge frustration because of my inability to express myself linguistically as clearly as I would like to.

David Gilmour

The most staggering linguistic turnabout for me is the one that equates green economy with 'sustained economic growth.'

Tim Jackson

Simplicity may be simple, but like complexity it requires linguistic precision, and may therefore call for relatively obscure expressions at times.

John White

Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?

Carol P. Christ

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

John le Carre

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

Jean Piaget

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.

John Wesley Powell