Language History Quotes

I think they named the orange before the carrot.

If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.

English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar. It's the most punderful language because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass that makes a lingo good for punning.

Once upon a time the plural of 'wizard' was 'war'.

At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.

'Entrepreneur' is a French word.

To understand a word, we need to learn where it was born, what paths it took to reach where it is today, and how it has changed along the way. The word 'nice' is a positive word today, but hundreds of years ago, it meant 'stupid.'

To read" actually comes from the Latin reri "to calculate, to think" which is not only the progenitor of "read" but of "reason" as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein "to fit." Aside from giving us "reason," arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning "weapons." It seems that "to fit" the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms.

Bizarrely, our English word 'sturdy' may go back to the Latin turdus, thrush. Anyone described as 'sturdy' in the 1200s was wilfully reckless and possibly as immovable as a sozzled bird.

English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west.

English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.

With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.

As dialect began to be collected in the late 19th century, such words as Yorkshire's 'gobslotch' emerged, revealing the burgeoning association between gluttony and stupidity.

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.

Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize.

Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hebrew was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.

The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.