Grammar Quotes - Page 14

• Grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est. - Grammarians dispute, and the case it still before the courts.

  Horace

  Disputes, Court, Cases

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• For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?

  Bill Bryson

  Book, Writing, Men

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• By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

  Noam Chomsky

  Mean, Way, Language

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• I do not worry or even think of spelling, grammar, paragraphing, or punctuation (except periods) at this point. . .In the early throes of an idea there is for me only grammar of the mind, which is a flow of thought, as natural and precise as the flow of a river to the sea.

  Mary O'Neill

  Thinking, Sea, Ideas

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• The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Character, Data

  Andrea Moro, Noam Chomsky, Ivano Caponigro, Daniel B. Kane (2015). “The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages”, p.37, MIT Press

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• Given a choice of weapons with you sir, I should choose grammar.

  Halliwell Hobbes

  Funny Inspirational, Choices, Weapons

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• The rules of grammar exist in large part to permit readers and writers to operate from a shared set of expectations.

  Michael Crichton

  Expectations, Permit, Reader

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• I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Father, School, Son

  Source: www.foundingfatherquotes.com

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• Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.

  Laurence Sterne

  Learning, Science, Dictionary

  Laurence Sterne (1805). “The Works of Laurence Sterne, A. M.: A sentimental journey through France and Italy. The Koran: or, The life, character and sentiments of Tria Juncta in Uno. A political romance”, p.339

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• I'd like to say a few words about one of the most popular concepts in the modern education--show and tell. Show and Tell is a device created by grammar schools to communicate family secrets to 32 other families before 9:15 am in the morning.

  Robert Orben

  Education, Morning, Teaching

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• The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems.

  Heinz Pagels

  Book, Science, Law

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• We receive experience from nature in a series of messages. From these messages we extract a content of information: that is, we decode the messages in some way. And from this code of information we then make a basic vocabulary of concepts and a basic grammar of laws, which jointly describe the inner organization that nature translates into the happenings and the appearances we meet.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Nature, Science, Vocabulary

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• It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they "speak with the accent of natives" they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.

  Ivan Illich

  Art, Learning, People

  Ivan Illich (1974). “Mission and Midwifery: Essays on Missionary Formation”

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• Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components... the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second, by the phonological component.

  Noam Chomsky

  Numbers, Three, Firsts

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• Language corresponds only to itself. Intellectuals suffer from that. And once you begin to question language, you cannot stop at studying linguistics. Analytical philosophy becomes insufficient, artificial grammar becomes insufficient.

  Martin Walser

  Philosophy, Suffering, Study

  "We Cannot Retreat To Atheism". Interview with Alexander Görlach, www.theeuropean-magazine.com. March 9, 2012.

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• It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology.

  Niels Kaj Jerne

  Children, Mean, Science

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• Bad music is the attempt to imitate something that has very strong rules and grammar.

  Carlo Grante

  Strong, Music Is, Bad Music

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• Well, as a visual artist working with the phenomenon of cinema, the grammar of cinema, [making a feature] was bound to happen. Everything I do is like sculpting with image and sound.

  Nicolas Provost

  Artist, Sound, Cinema

  Source: filmmakermagazine.com

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• [My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge.

  Nicolas Provost

  Art, Play, Challenges

  Source: filmmakermagazine.com

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• I love the silent era because you can see the rules being written, the grammar of film being created. Most of my films are in some way love letters to the silent era.

  Dave McKean

  Letters, Way, Eras

  Source: theculturalgutter.com

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• Reading and writing, arithmetic and grammar do not constitute education, any more than a knife, fork and spoon constitute a dinner.

  John Lubbock

  Education, Reading, Teaching

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• Too many Christians are fighting graduate school sins with a grammar school knowledge of God.

  John Piper

  Christian, School, Fighting

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• I cannot recall a period when I did not draw; and at school, the studies that were distasteful to me, mathematics and grammar , were retarded by the indulgence of teachers who were proud of my drawing faculties, and passed over my neglect of uncongenial subjects.

  Jacob Epstein

  Teacher, School, Drawing

  Jacob Epstein, (2013). “Let There Be Sculpture”, p.10, Read Books Ltd

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• Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?

  Tom Robbins

  School, Magic, Sorcery

  "The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins". Interview with Tony Vigorito, realitysandwich.com. 2012.

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• The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Latin, Speaks Out, Devil

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