#linguistics

How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light-bulb?” goes the old Lojban joke. “Two: one to decide what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb emits broken light. ↗

— Arika Okrent

#language #linguistics #lojban #change

The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and abuse, provides, I think, almost the only specimens of words that are purely emotional, words from which all imaginative or conceptual content has vanished, so that they have no function at all but to express or stimulate emotion, or both. And an examination of them soon convinces us that in them we see language at its least linguistic. We have come to the frontier between language and inarticulate vocal sounds. And at that frontier we find a two-way traffic going on. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#linguistics #words #imagination

نجد أن الفن الحداثي يزداد ابهاما وتعقيدا حتى اصبح فنا نخبويا رغم ثورته على البرجوازية ↗

— عبد الوهاب المسيري

#linguistics #literature #inspirational

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us. ↗

— Kenneth L. Pike

#even #find #intelligible #linguistics #marvelous

In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics. ↗

— Ferdinand de Saussure

#different #general #grammar #inscriptions #instance

It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone. ↗

— Ferdinand de Saussure

#anyone #aware #become #contribution #evident

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another. ↗

— Ferdinand de Saussure

#branch #general #language #languages #laws

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 teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind. ↗

— Arika Okrent

#linguistics #nature #life

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. ↗

— William Jones

#family

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#linguistics #science #humor