Language Structure Quotes

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.

Anarchy is as detestable in grammar as it is in society.

The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.

ORTHOGRAPHY, n. The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear.

One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

I write in words. I don't write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors.

I know what the structure of the language is.

Grammar is...the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.

They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs.

Our speech has its weaknesses and its defects, like all the rest. Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.

I think Latin has some logic to it and there was a discipline.

I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

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

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.