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

 * Illustrating a meaningless but grammatical sentence.
 * Illustrating a meaningless but grammatical sentence.


 * ; fruit flies like a banana.
 * Illustrating ambiguity.
 * Misattributed to Groucho Marx; first recorded on Usenet group net.jokes in 1982: See also Fred R. Shapiro, (2006). , 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.


 * Illustration of homonyms and homophones.
 * , 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).
 * , 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.