Roman Jakobson Quotes

Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve.

From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.

Speech sounds can be analyzed into fundamental units called phonemes; these move around like protozoa in a drop of water, and, like protozoa, join together and split up.

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

Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.

I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I'll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I'm not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others.

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

Rhythm and sounds are born with syllables.

The best scheme of Phonetics is a stiff uncertain thing.

Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.

When we, as humans, articulate, our tongues tend to hit the back of the teeth.

I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know 'No, he couldn't have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.'

From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.

I'm very interested in voice synthesis and vocoders in general.

Humans are still much better than computers at recognizing speech.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

Grammar is the analysis of language.

No matter which word it is, when I pronounce repeatedly, it ends up sounding utterly ridiculous and meaningless to me.

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

We must plow through the whole of language.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words.... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.