Linguistic Knowledge Quotes

I know what the structure of the language is.

And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

Shakespeare's taught me that there are more words in the English language than I have got in my head.

Without knowing the language of a people, we never really know their thoughts, their feelings, and their type of character.

Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience.

By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

It is not easy, but young people have to learn languages.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.

When you don't know how to pronounce words, when you don't know the meaning of the words, how will you imbibe a song with feeling?

You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse

[Instead of collecting stamps, he collected dictionaries and encyclopaedias:] Because you can learn more from them.

Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.

I know Hindi.

Learn the Arabic language; it will sharpen your wisdom.

Catalan language is one of the most complete and perfect expressions that I know from the point of view regarding language, I not only read it since many years ago, but I understand it. Moreover, I speak it intimately too.

I think once you understand a language, you understand the culture surrounding it as well.

I wish I knew more languages.

I speak some dwarvish.

Study a foreign language if you have opportunity to do so. You may never be called to a land where that language is spoken, but the study will have given you a better understanding of your own tongue or of another tongue you may be asked to acquire.