#linguistic

Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male? ↗

— Carol P. Christ

#device #does #even #everyone #god

Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language. ↗

— Robert Fripp

#argue #continue #debate #language #linguistic

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#both #connotation #fascinating #gained #how

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award. ↗

— Elfriede Jelinek

#deserving #draft #employing #exposing #expression

Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking creature with teeth like needles and bulging yellowish eyes that lives in deep waters off the coast of South America. It did not catch on with sophisticated foodies until an enterprising Los Angeles importer renamed it the considerably more palatable "Chilean sea bass. ↗

— Hal Herzog

#food #foodie #language #linguistics #names

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone. ↗

— Alfred Korzybski

#alone #between #found #linguistic #link

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations. ↗

— Edward Sapir

#art

It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some ancient languages had altered very little and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading, isolation, and state of civilisation of the several co-descended races, and had thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees of difference between the languages of the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#linguistics #taxonomy #change

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words. ↗

— Ngaio Marsh

#writing #death

No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism. ↗

— Edward Sapir

#category #complete #consistently #grammatical #handled