Linguists Quotes - Page 3

• I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

  Clive James

  Book, Order, Jail

  "Summer Series: Clive James, in the face of death". "PM" with Mark Colvin, www.abc.net.au. December 21, 2015.

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• When I think about discussions at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a group which includes not only philosophers and psychologists, but also computer scientists and linguists, it is noteworthy that one can't always tell just from the content of particular contributions from the audience, whether a given questioner is a philosopher or an empirical scientist.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Thinking, Psychology

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• To money, the finest linguist in the world!

  Minna Antrim

  Money, World, Finest

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• As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

  Larry Wall

  Thinking, Ada, Language

  "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting". www.perl.com. December 6, 2007.

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• When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love's adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages.

  Nizar Qabbani

  Lying, Men, Adjectives

  Nizar Qabbani, “Language”

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• There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. Thereis therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.

  Donald Davidson

  Giving Up, Ideas, Philosopher

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• Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

  John le Carre

  Literature, Fool, Language

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• True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love.

  David O. McKay

  Truth, Lying, Men

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• Impulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Logic, Failing, Impulse

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Early Spring in Massachusetts: From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau”, p.51, Library of Alexandria

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• These microscopic organisms form an entire world composed of species, families and varieties whose history, which has barely begun to be written, is already fertile in prospects and findings of the highest importance. The names of these organisms are very numerous and will have to be defined and in part discarded. The word microbe which has the advantage of being shorter and carrying a more general meaning, and of having been approved by my illustrious friend, M. Littré, the most competent linguist in France, is one we will adopt.

  Louis Pasteur

  Science, Names, Nomenclature

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• I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. In that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians. To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.

  Max Muller

  Mean, Eye, Hair

  "Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas". Book by Max Müller, 1888.

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• I feel such a difference between a philologist/linguist and a linguaphile as, say, a choreographer and a ballerina.

  Kató Lomb

  Differences, Ballerina, Feels

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• Even if you close your eyes, you'll still hear Donald Trump sniffing. Linguists might call [these visuals] paralinguistics, every form of information including facial gestures and facial features. Obviously these things get scrutinized in tremendous detail, so that a cough can be of outsized importance. [But] that's all part of the package.

  Ben Zimmer

  Eye, Details, Gestures

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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