Linguists Quotes - Page 2

• 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.

  Zoltan Kodaly

  Inspirational, Music, Numbers

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• The corporations plainly want academic scholarship to create a web of mystification that will avoid any public awareness of the way in which power actually functions in the society, and the faculty has caught the message and they do it magnificently.

  Noam Chomsky

  Power, Society, Want

  Noam Chomsky (2004). “Language and Politics”, p.136, AK Press

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• The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

  Noam Chomsky

  Bible, Atheist, Book

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• 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.

  Noam Chomsky

  Sky, Long, Drones

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• 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

  Media, Democracy, United States

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

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• It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

  Noam Chomsky

  Leadership, Truth, Lying

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

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• All dogs seem to be great linguists, according to their owners. They always understand every word that's said to them.

  Susan Ertz

  Dog, Owners, Said

  Susan Ertz (1931). “The Story of Julian”, New York D. Appleton 1931.

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• We decipherers cannot afford to be as picky as the linguist, who can always run back to a native speaker for a few more forms.

  E. J. W. Barber

  Running, History, Form

  E. J. W. Barber (1974). “Archaeological Decipherment: A Handbook”

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• My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

  Steven Pinker

  Opinion, Philosopher, Human Nature

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

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• It was an epiphany when I realized you don't have to call yourself a linguist, a translator, a poet. You can call yourself an artist and you can do all these things.

  Jan Peacock

  Artist, Poet, Epiphany

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• The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months.

  Tim Ferriss

  Children, Work, Research

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

  Ronald Reagan

  Russian Language, Language, Has Beens

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1988). “Ronald Reagan”

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• I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less - filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt.

  Daniel Keyes

  Men, Discipline, Library

  "Flowers for Algernon".

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• You might be a cunning linguist, but I am a master debater.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Funny, Might, Masters

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• 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.

  John Searle

  Believe, Numbers, Effort

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• 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.

  Geoffrey K. Pullum

  Marine, Bus Stops, Lasts

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• 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

  Matter, Philosopher, Debate

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• A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as "E is dense in itself".

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Learning, Mean, Math

  John Edensor Littlewood (1953). “A mathematicians's miscellany”

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• 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.

  David Crystal

  Children, Taken, Kids

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• A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.

  Roman Jakobson

  Language, Poetic, Deaf

  Roman Jakobson, Krystyna Pomorska, Stephen Rudy (1987). “Language in Literature”, p.94, Harvard University Press

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• 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.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Science, Hands, People

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• To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.

  Tom Stoppard

  Sound, Actors, Done

  Source: news.postimees.ee

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• 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].

  Rhys Ifans

  Reading, Wife, Secret

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• 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.

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Sound, Different, Language

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• 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.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Art, Real, Nice

  Source: www.pbs.org

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