#linguistic

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

Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#change

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#linguistics #political-correctness #equality

In the world “out there,” there are no verbs, no speech events, and no adjacency pairs. There are particles of matter moving around in certain recurrent and yet not fully predictable patterns. We interpret such experiences as and through symbolic means, including linguistic expressions. That’s what it means to be human. ↗

— Duranti a Alessandro

#linguistic-anthropology #linguistics #experience

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

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. ↗

— Frantz Fanon

#politics #psychology #culture

Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic. ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#nature #nature

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. ↗

— Robert Morgan

#discovering #elementary #experience #far #go

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas. ↗

— Ferdinand de Saussure

#differences #ideas #linguistic #series #sound

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