20th-century Linguist Quotes

The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family. The implications of such a classification for the origin and history of our species would, of course, be very great.

Joseph Greenberg

When writing a poem, I feel like I'm translating. And when I'm translating, I feel like I'm writing.

It's one thing to make lemonade out of lemons, another to proclaim that
lemons are what you'd hope for in the first place.

The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.

Learning is a deep human need, like mating and eating, and like all such needs it is meant to be deeply pleasurable to human beings.

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

The nomadic Semite... roves as a herdsman, partaking of Allah's hospitality.

Cyrus H. Gordon

Here I begin to know that blessedness is what can be snatched out the passing day and put away to think of afterwards.

If you give yourself that short little moment of thinking, then you cannot miss it.

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.

Alberto Manguel

People with an interest in the workings of any society must also concern themselves with its language — how it is structured and used, what its users believe about it and so on.

Deborah Cameron (linguist)

Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart.

Life is not historical, but something more like nature.

Girls are not accustomed to jockeying for status in an obvious way; they are more concerned that they be liked.

A physical system is just that: a physical system. What is systematized is matter itself, and the processes in which the system is realized are also material. But a biological system is more complex: it is both biological and physical — it is matter with the added component of life; and a social system is more complex still: it is physical, and biological, with the added component of social order, or value. … A semiotic system is still one step further in complexity: it is physical, and biological, and social —and also semiotic: what is being systematized is meaning. In evolutionary terms, it is a system of the fourth order of complexity

Michael Halliday

History
Coming too close
Is monstrous, like a doll
That is alive and bigger than the child
Who tries to hold it.

Babette Deutsch

Secrets could never be rushed. They had to come of their own accord, on their own schedule. That way, when they came, the offered themselves as a gift.

Donna Jo Napoli

A language is a dialect with an army and navy.

A community is known by the language it keeps, and its words chronicle the times. Every aspect of the life of a people is reflected in the words they use to talk about themselves and the world around them. As their world changes — through invention, discovery, revolution, evolution, or personal transformation — so does their language.

Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others.

My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

It was really [David] Whitteridge who taught me to be a scientist.

Peter Ladefoged

When the conspiracy of lies surrounding me demands of me to silence the one word of truth given to me, that word becomes the one word I wish to utter above all others.

Why are we so concerned about whether other animals are like human beings or not? Because we are worried about whether we should consider them kinfolk of ours, relatives. If they are relatives of ours, then we should treat them with more respect than if they are not.

The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.