Linguistics

1:You asked me what linguistics I find most pernicious. I started with "is". The "either/or" habit is very pernicious. It seems very pernicious to me, I mean. Two-valued situations are relatively rare, actually. ~ Robert Anton Wilson,

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1:Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove

2:Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove

3:The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics. ~ d-t-suzuki, @wisdomtrove

4:They arose in my mind as &

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1:My linguistics is pretty theoretical. ~ Noam Chomsky,

2:Linguine linguistics that left my verbal essence saucy, ~ Action Bronson,

3:Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics. ~ Roman Jakobson,

4:I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people. ~ Matthew McConaughey,

5:essential differences between generative grammar and structural linguistics. ~ Noam Chomsky,

6:Linguistics got me into this excellent mess––only physics can get me out. ~ Neal Stephenson,

7:Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was. ~ Ogden Nash,

8:In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain. ~ Aloe Blacc,

9:A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms. ~ Roman Jakobson,

10:Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences. ~ Samuel R Delany,

11:We mathematicians are used to the fact that our subject is widely misunderstood, perhaps more than any other subject (except perhaps linguistics). ~ Keith Devlin,

12:cockneys (which would make it one of the few instances in modern linguistics in which a manner of utterance traveled upward from the lower classes). ~ Bill Bryson,

13:The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us. ~ Kenneth Lee Pike,

14:What's "right" in language comprehension: ERPs reveal right hemisphere language capabilities" published in Language and Linguistics Compass (2008; Volume 2, pages 1-17). ~ Anonymous,

15:The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics. ~ Ferdinand de Saussure,

16:Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs. ~ Douglas Adams,

17:Pharoahe Monch is like an eloquent linguistics professor moonlighting as a rhyme serial killer terrorist, challenging the listeners' I.Q. while daring him or her to keep up. ~ Kool Moe Dee,

18:Noam Chomsky, widely regarded as the father of modern linguistics, asserts grammar—that is, syntax—is the result of a hardwired language acquisition device in the human brain, ~ Mark Sisson,

19:It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics. ~ Angela Carter,

20:In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language. ~ Terry Pratchett,

21:The purpose of quantum linguistics is to survey the spirit of linguistics and finding solutions to the common barrier problems faced by means of deliberate use of language. ~ Stephen Richards,

22:The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics. ~ D T Suzuki,

23:It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent. ~ Ferdinand de Saussure,

24:Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another. ~ Ferdinand de Saussure,

25:Everyone stared at me now. I’d studied linguistics a long time ago. A little philology too, the study of languages from analyzing texts. Mostly for the fun of it, but the subject came in useful sometimes. Ellis ~ Jeffery Deaver,

26:You asked me what linguistics I find most pernicious. I started with "is". The "either/or" habit is very pernicious. It seems very pernicious to me, I mean. Two-valued situations are relatively rare, actually. ~ Robert Anton Wilson,

27:You asked me what linguistics I find most pernicious. I started with "is". The "either/or" habit is very pernicious. It seems very pernicious to me, I mean. Two-valued situations are relatively rare, actually. ~ Robert Anton Wilson,

28:Perhaps the most powerful challenge in this regard is how the relativist can avoid destroying his own position. Any statement of relativism, whether grounded in culture, linguistics, or hermeneutics, is fundamentally self-destructive. ~ D A Carson,

29: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. ~ Neal Stephenson,

30:Language corresponds only to itself. Intellectuals suffer from that. And once you begin to question language, you cannot stop at studying linguistics. Analytical philosophy becomes insufficient, artificial grammar becomes insufficient. ~ Martin Walser,

31:Linguistics is our best tool for bringing about social change and SF is our best tool for testing such changes before they are implemented in the real world, therefore the conjunction of the two is desirable and should be useful. ~ Suzette Haden Elgin,

32:It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone. ~ Ferdinand de Saussure,

33:No one can say, "Here is Biology, here Mathematics, here Philosophy." No one can point to Physics, or show us Chemistry. In reality no dotted lines divide History from Geography or Physics from Chemistry, or Philosophy from Linguistics, and so on. These ~ John Holt,

34:When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles. ~ Noam Chomsky,

35:In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I've done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught. ~ Noam Chomsky,

36:But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her. ~ David Nicholls,

37:In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics. ~ Ferdinand de Saussure,

38:He immersed himself in anthropology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours without collecting a degree. He saw no reason to. The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation. ~ Jon Krakauer,

39:Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher. ~ Marvin Minsky,

40:Psychology, the talking cure, linguistics, and semantics - they're all like dogs poking around and sniffing their own vomit. There might be some gems in there, you never know. For certain you will at the very least know what you had for lunch. And you can ascertain what not to eat again. ~ David Byrne,

41:Linguistics is a good way of defining the culture of a brand. The vocabulary used by sports and lifestyle brands - running, fitness, training, motorsports - is all about functionality, whereas the vocabulary of the luxury business - handbags, ready-to-wear - is all about the product. ~ Francois Henri Pinault,

42:A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock? ~ Steven Pinker,

43:What if the child’s dependence on her twin is so great that the separation causes a mental trauma such that the damaged mind provides solace by the creation of an imaginary twin, a fantasy companion? We arrived at no satisfactory conclusion but parted with the satisfaction of having located another area of future study: linguistics. ~ Diane Setterfield,

44:The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind. ~ Arika Okrent,

45:I tell ya, if I hadn't chosen the career of being a performer, I think linguistics would have been a natural area that I'd have loved - to teach it, probably, Language has always fascinated me. There's a genetic inheritance there a good language gene, which I inherited [from my mother and grandfather] and she fostered that in me as he fostered that in her. ~ George Carlin,

46:All dictators, irrespective of epoch or country, have one common trait: they know everything, are experts on everything. The thoughts of Qadaffi and Ceauşescu, Idi Amin and Alfredo Stroessner—there is no end to the profundities and wisdom. Stalin was expert on history, economics, poetry, and linguistics. As it turned out, he was also expert on architecture. ~ Ryszard Kapu ci ski,

47:The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural. The artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents -- this artifact is mimicked in a more or less ludic manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable: something like chess. ~ Roland Barthes,

48:Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine,

49:They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'. ~ J R R Tolkien,

50:A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it - the element of the sacred. ~ Mircea Eliade,

51:To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds. ~ Terence McKenna,

52:In the field of suppressed languages there are many now that attract more attention ... Basque ... Breton ... Romany.... They all sign up for those.... Not that they study the language: nobody wants to do that these days.... They want problems to debate, general ideas to connect with other general ideas. My colleagues adjust, follow the mainstream, give their courses titles like ‘Sociology of Welsh,’ 'Psycho-linguistics of Provençal.”... ~ Italo Calvino,

53:Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch,

54:In studying language we can discover many basic properties of this cognitive structure, its organization, and also the genetic predispositions that provide the foundation for its development. So in this respect, linguistics, first of all, tries to characterize a major feature of human cognitive organization. And second, I think it may provide a suggestive model for the study of other cognitive systems. And the collection of these systems is one aspect of human nature. ~ Noam Chomsky,

55:When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it. But since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves. What they call anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, is nothing but literature reappearing like the hydra's head in the very spot where it had been suppressed. The human mind will go through amazing feats to avoid facing 'the nothingness of human matters'. ~ Paul De Man,

56:So speakers of English change the accent on words like thirteen when they precede and modify other words, in order to get the result of alternating accents while at the same time maintaining the accent on the main word of the phrase, in this case the noun women in the noun phrase THIRteen Women. And no English-speaking child ever had to be taught this pattern of accents! They just do it. Figuring out how this is possible is one of the puzzles that make linguistics fun. ~ Daniel L Everett,

57:Built in the hope of distracting workers from the peril of drink, it contained a gymnasium, a laboratory, a billiards room, a library, a reading room, and a lecture and concert hall. Never before had manual workers been given a more lavish opportunity to better themselves, an opportunity that many scores enthusiastically seized. One James Waddington, an untutored woolsorter, became a world authority on linguistics and a leading light of the Phonetic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. ~ Bill Bryson,

58:Then again, it'd taken more than two hundred years after the invention of the scientific method before any Muggle scientists had thought to systematically investigate which sentences a human four-year-old could or couldn't understand. The developmental psychology of linguistics could've been discovered in the eighteenth century, in principle, but no one had even thought to look until the twentieth. So you couldn't really blame the much smaller wizarding world for not investigating the Retrieval Charm. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,

59:Mr. Jukes’s work involves the creation of the spiritual slogans that uplift the consumer half of the nation. A few of these have come down to us in more or less fragmentary condition, and those of you who have taken Professor Rex Harrison’s course, Linguistics 916, know the extraordinary difficulties we are encountering in our attempts to interpret: ‘Good to the Last Drop’ (for ‘good’ read ‘God’?); ‘Does She or Doesn’t She?’ (what?); and ‘I Dreamed I Went to the Circus in My Maidenform Bra’ (incomprehensible). ~ Alfred Bester,

60:It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule. ~ John Searle,

61:It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule. ~ John Rogers Searle,

62:The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life. ~ Edward O Wilson,

63:Yeah because he don't want to debate me, I'm too intellectual. One thing about me, you know, I'm the equivalent of an Obama, you know what I'm saying. My intellect is very deep. I have linguistics and dialects that he probably couldn't comprehend. My mental gymnastics which is overcapacitate his train of thought. So I wouldn't you know even be in the same vocabulary with him. You know. It would hurt him for him to have me on television and me to have more conversation and more intellect than him. And him being some old, blue eyed, whatever the fuck coloured hair guy bald spot having dick sucking son of a bitch. ~ Snoop Dogg,

64:Immediately on my arrival at the Project I began studying linguistics, because that seemed imperative to me. I was soon amazed to learn that, when it came to the primary, most fundamental concepts in this field—a field supposedly precise, quantified, mathematized—there was absolutely no agreement. Why, the authorities could not come together on so basic and preliminary a question as what exactly morphemes and phonemes were. But when I asked the appropriate people, in all sincerity, how in the world they could accomplish anything, given this state of affairs, my naive question was taken as a sneering insinuation. I ~ Stanis aw Lem,

65:Who could possibly miss these questions? As it turns out, most people do. This includes the leading scholars in many top departments of psychology and linguistics around the world. Your high school English teachers would have done no better. How about you? The answers are: 1. a; 2. c; 3. b; 4. c; 5. a; 6. a. Women use first-person singular, cognitive, and social words more; men use articles more; and there are no meaningful differences between men and women for first-person plural or positive emotion words. If you are like most people, you probably got the social words question right and missed most of the others. ~ James W Pennebaker,

66:The Maya did not emerge from the lost tribes of Israel or Atlantis. Instead, based on overwhelming evidence from linguistics, physical anthropology, and archaeology, ancestors of all New World people, including the Maya, migrated from Asia as nomadic hunters and gatherers. The debate surrounds the timing of their arrival in the Yucatan region and whether the migration across the Bering Strait occurred at about 12,000 BCE, 40,000 BCE or even earlier. Scholars continue to debate whether the Maya made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming villages in the lowland areas they occupied or if it spread into the lowlands from elsewhere. ~ Hourly History,

67:Early in “Postulates of Linguistics,” Deleuze and Guattari claim that, “the elementary unit of language … is the order-word,” which “not to be believe but to be obeyed” (ATP, 76). Perhaps the starkest example is the judge’s sentence that condemns a criminal to death (80-81; 94). But the French for order-word, mot d’ordre, also refers to the political slogan, which is substantiated by Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to Lenin’s pamphlet “On Slogans” (83). Both of these examples indicate how closely their linguistics aligns with the rhetorical theory of symbolic action. Rhetoric is excellent at studying those acts that cause incorporeal transformations, which as changes in a state of affairs that do not directly alter its materiality (80-88). ~ Anonymous,

68:This brings up some lessons to be learned from cognitive linguistics. • Words are defined relative to conceptual frames. Words evoke frames, and if you want to evoke the right frames, you need the right words. • To use the other side’s words is to accept their framing of the issues. • Higher-level moral frames limit the scope of the frames defining particular issues. • To negate a frame is to accept that frame. Example: To carry out the instruction “Don’t think of an elephant” you have to think of an elephant. • Rebuttal is not reframing. You have to impose your own framing before you can successfully rebut. • The facts themselves won’t set you free. You have to frame facts properly before they can have the meaning you want them to convey. These ~ George Lakoff,

69:Many people also worry about microwave radiation from cell phones. Unlike X-rays, which are high-energy photons, microwaves are photons with extremely low energy. They deposit their energy in the form of heat; that’s what they do in microwave ovens. They do not break DNA molecules in the body (unless they actually burn and char the material), and therefore they pose no risk of causing cancer in the way that X-rays and other energetic radiation (even sunlight) can. The main danger is the heat. Much of the fear of microwaves undoubtedly comes from the fact that they share the name radiation with the other, far more dangerous forms, such as gamma radiation. The fear that some people have shown toward such cell phone radiation finds its origin not in physics, but in linguistics. ~ Richard A Muller,

70:Accepting the fact that she did indeed have Alzheimer's, that she could only bank on two unacceptably effective drugs available to treat it, and that she couldn't trade any of this in for some other, curable disease, what did she want? Assuming the in vitro procedure worked, she wanted to live to hold Anna's baby and know it was her grandchild. She wanted to see Lydia act in something she was proud of. She wanted to see Tom fall in love. She wanted one more sabbatical year with John. She wanted to read every book she could before she could no longer read.

She laughed a little, surprised at what she'd just revealed about herself. Nowhere in that list was anything about linguistics, teaching, or Harvard. She ate her last bite of cone. She wanted more sunny, seventy-degree days and ice-cream cones. ~ Lisa Genova,

71:Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics. The Muslim civilization provided an ideal cradle for cryptanalysis, because Islam demands justice in all spheres of human activity, and achieving this requires knowledge, or ilm. Every Muslim is obliged to pursue knowledge in all its forms, and the economic success of the Abbasid caliphate meant that scholars had the time, money, and materials required to fulfil their duty. They endeavoured to acquire knowledge of previous civilizations by obtaining Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Farsi, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew and Roman texts and translating them into Arabic. In 815, the Caliph of Ma'mun established in Baghdad the Bait al-Hikmah ('House of Wisdom'), a library and centre for translation. ~ Simon Singh,

72:The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the ‘external’ elements of linguistics from the ‘internal’ elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects. ~ Pierre Bourdieu,

73:It is understandable how this shame came into being. The nation made the black man's color a stigma. Even linguistics and semantics conspire to give this impression. If you look in Roget's Thesaurus you will find about 120 synonyms for blacK, and right down the line you will find words like smut, something dirty, worthless, and useless, and then you look further and you find about 120 synonyms for white and they all represent something high, noble, pure, chaste - right down the line. In our language structure, a white lie is a little better than a black lie. Somebody goes wrong in the family and we don't call him a white sheep, we call him a black sheep. We don't say whitemail, but blackmail. We don't speak of white-balling somebody, but black-balling somebody. The word 'black' itself in our society connotes something that is degrading. It was absolutely necessary to come to a moment with a sense of dignity. It is very positive and very necessary. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,

74:An inseparable complement to the exoticism in his stories is the erudition, the bits of specialized knowledge, usually literary, but also philological, historical, philosophical, or theological. This knowledge, which borders on but never oversteps the bounds of pedantry, is quite freely flaunted. But the point is not to show off Borges's wide acquaintance with different cultures. Rather, it is a key element in his creative strategy, the aim of which was to imbue his stories with a certain colorfulness, to endow them with an atmosphere all their own. In other words Borges's learning by his use of exotic settings and characters fulfills an exclusively literary function, which, in twisting the erudition around and making it sometimes decorative, sometimes symbolic, subordinates it to the task at hand. In this way Borges's theology, philosophy, linguistics and so forth, lose their original character, take on the quality of fiction, and, becoming part and parcel of a literary fantasy, are turned into literature. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa,

75:THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTIONa It seems that eight heavyweight Evolutionistsb—linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists—had published an article announcing they were giving up, throwing in the towel, folding, crapping out when it came to the question of where speech—language—comes from and how it works. “The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever,” they concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we’ll keep trying, they said gamely…but we’ll have to start from zero again. One of the eight was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. “In the last 40 years,” he and the other seven were saying, “there has been an explosion of research on this problem,” and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia. Now, that was odd…I had never heard of a group of experts coming together to announce what abject failures they were… ~ Tom Wolfe,

76:firstly, what "really" attracted me to Indo-European, as well as to English, Polish, and Russian philology, wasn't the seductive variety of linguistic forms, or the infinitely picturesque accidents that fill the histories of words and dialects, but rather the fact that these obey lays that can be rigorously described, and that these laws, such as Grimm's Law in Germanic philology, or the principles of Slavic palatalization, which lie behind all those wonderful alveolar fricatives in Russia and the Auvergne, promised to submit the irresistible and etrnal movement of languages no longer to mere chance, but to something that closely resembled calculation;
- and that, secondly, and consequently, the noblest aspect of linguistics (and if I had been familiar with Trouetzkoy's phonology and with Jakobson, this conclusion would have been even more obvious) was its power of deduction -- but that there remained something even nobler, which was the terrain of pure deduction, in other words, mathematics. And that it is why I absolutely had to become a mathematician. ~ Jacques Roubaud,

77:The first eye-opener came in the 1970s, when DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, organized the first large-scale speech recognition project. To everyone’s surprise, a simple sequential learner of the type Chomsky derided handily beat a sophisticated knowledge-based system. Learners like it are now used in just about every speech recognizer, including Siri. Fred Jelinek, head of the speech group at IBM, famously quipped that “every time I fire a linguist, the recognizer’s performance goes up.” Stuck in the knowledge-engineering mire, computational linguistics had a near-death experience in the late 1980s. Since then, learning-based methods have swept the field, to the point where it’s hard to find a paper devoid of learning in a computational linguistics conference. Statistical parsers analyze language with accuracy close to that of humans, where hand-coded ones lagged far behind. Machine translation, spelling correction, part-of-speech tagging, word sense disambiguation, question answering, dialogue, summarization: the best systems in these areas all use learning. Watson, the Jeopardy! computer champion, would not have been possible without it. ~ Pedro Domingos,

78:It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs. ~ Douglas Adams,

79:Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated and fraught with the effects of moments from the past. My mom knew this and wanted me to know it too. On one visit home, I found an essay from the Washington Post by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen that had been cut out and left on my desk. My mom, and her mom before her, loved clipping newspaper articles and cartoons from the paper to send to Barbara and me. This article was different. Above it, my mom had written a note: “Dear Benny”—I was “Benny” from the time I was a toddler; the family folklore was that when we were babies, a man approached my parents, commenting on their cute baby boys, and my parents played along, pretending our names were Benjamin and Beauregard, later shorted to Benny and Bo.
In her note, my mom confessed to doing many things that the writer of this piece had done: checking my hair, my appearance. As a teenager, I was continually annoyed by some of her requests: comb your hair; pull up your jeans (remember when low-rise jeans were a thing? It was not a good look, I can assure you!). “Your mother may assume it goes without saying that she is proud of you,” Deborah Tannen wrote. “Everyone knows that. And everyone probably also notices that your bangs are obscuring your vision—and their view of your eyes. Because others won’t say anything, your mother may feel it’s her obligation to tell you.” In leaving her note and the clipping, my mom was reminding me that she accepted and loved me—and that there is no perfect way to be a mother. While we might have questioned some of the things our mother said, we never questioned her love. ~ Jenna Bush Hager,

80:Oh, those lapses, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the “let it all hang out” ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the “rules” of “correct” grammar.

To a linguist, if I may share, these “rules” occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The “rules” make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.

Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat, not—that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.

The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.

Yet, in my experience, to try to get these things across to laymen often results in the person’s verging on anger. There is a sense that these “rules” just must be right, and that linguists’ purported expertise on language must be somehow flawed on this score. We are, it is said, permissive—perhaps along the lines of the notorious leftist tilt among academics, or maybe as an outgrowth of the roots of linguistics in anthropology, which teaches that all cultures are equal. In any case, we are wrong. Maybe we have a point here and there, but only that. ~ John McWhorter,

81:Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world. ~ Edward W Said,

82:In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I’ve done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught. But I’ve often been invited by universities to speak on mathematical linguistics at mathematics seminars and colloquia. No one has ever asked me whether I have the appropriate credentials to speak on these subjects; the mathematicians couldn’t care less. What they want to know is what I have to say. No one has ever objected to my right to speak, asking whether I have a doctor’s degree in mathematics, or whether I have taken advanced courses in the subject. That would never have entered their minds. They want to know whether I am right or wrong, whether the subject is interesting or not, whether better approaches are possible… the discussion dealt with the subject, not with my right to discuss it.
But on the other hand, in discussion or debate concerning social issues or American foreign policy…. The issue is constantly raised, often with considerable venom. I’ve repeatedly been challenged on grounds of credentials, or asked, what special training do I have that entitles you to speak on these matters. The assumption is that people like me, who are outsiders from a professional viewpoint, are not entitled to speak on such things.
Compare mathematics and the political sciences… it’s quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content. ~ Noam Chomsky,

83:Dave does extra-mural work for the University, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave’s pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to me a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave’s pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave’s pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding University vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that. They are prepared within certain limits to alter their views. Many of them arrive as theosophists and depart as Critical Realists or Bradeians. It is remarkable how Dave’s criticism seems os often to be purely catalytic in its action. He blazes upon them with the destructive fury of the sun, but instead of shrivelling up their metaphysical pretensions, achieves merely their metamorphosis from one rich stage into another. This curious fact makes me think that perhaps after all Dave is, in spite of himself, a good teacher. Occasionally he succeeds in converting some peculiarly receptive youth to his own brand of linguistics analysis; after which as often as not the youth loses interest in philosophy altogether. To watch Dave at work on these young men is like watching someone prune a rose bush. It is all the strongest and most luxuriant shoots which have to come off. Then later perhaps there will be blossoms; but not philosophical ones, Dave trusts. His great aim is to dissuade the young from philosophy. He always warns me off it with particular earnestness. ~ Iris Murdoch,

84:This was the big advantage of “Oriental“ campaign excavations: whereas in Europe they were forced by their budgets to dig themselves, archaeologists in Syria, like their glorious predecessors, could delegate the lowly tasks. As Bilger said, quoting The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”: “you see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig.” So the European archaeologists had acquired an extremely specialized and technical Arabic vocabulary: dig here, clear there, with a shovel, a pickax, a small pick, a trowel — the brush was the privilege of Westerners. Dig gently, clear quickly, and it was not rare to overhear the following dialogue:
“Go one meter down here.”
“Yes boss. With an excavation shovel?”
“Um, big shovel… Big shovel no. Instead pickax.”
“With the big pickax?”
“Big pickax no. Little pick.”
“So, we should dig down to one meter with the little pick?”
“Na’am, na’am. Shwia shwia, Listen, don’t go smashing in the whole world to finish more quickly, OK?”
In these circumstances there were obviously misunderstandings that led to irreparable losses for science: a number of walls and stylobates fell victim to the perverse alliance of linguistics and capitalism, but on the whole the archaeologists were happy with their personnel, whom they trained, so to speak, season after season....[I am] curious to know what these excavations represent, for these workers. Do they have the feeling that we are stripping them of their history, that Europeans are stealing something from them, once again?
Bilger had a theory: he argued that for these workmen whatever came before Islam does not belong to them, is of another order, another world, which falls into the category of the qadim jiddan, the “very old”; Bilger asserted that for a Syrian, the history of the world is divided into three periods: jadid, recent; qadim, old; qadim jiddan, very old, without it being very clear if it was simply his own level of Arabic that was the cause for such a simplification: even if his workers talked to him about the succession of Mesopotamian dynasties, they would have had to resort, lacking a common language that he could understand, to the qadim jiddan. ~ Mathias nard,

85:This was the big advantage of “Oriental“ campaign excavations: whereas in Europe they were forced by their budgets to dig them selves, archaeologists in Syria, like their glorious predecessors, could delegate the lowly tasks. As Bilger said, quoting The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”: “you see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig.” So the European archaeologists had acquired an extremely specialized and technical Arabic vocabulary: dig here, clear there, with a shovel, a pickax, a small pick, a trowel — the brush was the privilege of Westerners. Dig gently, clear quickly, and it was not rare to overhear the following dialogue:
“Go one meter down here.”
“Yes boss. With an excavation shovel?”
“Um, big shovel… Big shovel no. Instead pickax.”
“With the big pickax?”
“Big pickax no. Little pick.”
“So, we should dig down to one meter with the little pick?”
“Na’am, na’am. Shwia shwia, Listen, don’t go smashing in the whole world to finish more quickly, OK?”
In these circumstances there were obviously misunderstandings that led to irreparable losses for science: a number of walls and stylobates fell victim to the perverse alliance of linguistics and capitalism, but on the whole the archaeologists were happy with their personnel, whom they trained, so to speak, season after season....[I am] curious to know what these excavations represent, for these workers. Do they have the feeling that we are stripping them of their history, that Europeans are stealing something from them, once again?
Bilger had a theory: he argued that for these workmen whatever came before Islam does not belong to them, is of another order, another world, which falls into the category of the qadim jiddan, the “very old”; Bilger asserted that for a Syrian, the history of the world is divided into three periods: jadid, recent; qadim, old; qadim jiddan, very old, without it being very clear if it was simply his own level of Arabic that was the cause for such a simplification: even if his workers talked to him about the succession of Mesopotamian dynasties, they would have had to resort, lacking a common language that he could understand, to the qadim jiddan. ~ Mathias nard,

86:Issib wasn't thrilled to see him. I'm busy and don't need interruptions."

"This is the household library," said Nafai. "This is where we always come to do research."

"See? You're interrupting already."

"Look, I didn't say anything, I just came in here, and you started picking at me the second I walked in the door."

"I was hoping you'd walk back out."

"I can't. Mother sent me here." Nafai walked over behind Issib, who was floating comfortably in the air in front of his computer display. It was layered thirty pages deep, but each page had only a few words on it, so he could see almost everything at once. Like a game of solitaire, in which Issib was simply moving fragments from place to place.

The fragments were all words in weird languages. The ones Nafai recognized were very old.

"What language is that?" Nafai asked pointing, to one.

Issib signed. "I'm so glad you're not interrupting me."

"What is it, some ancient form of Vijati?"

"Very good. It's Slucajan, which came from Obilazati, the original form of Vijati. It's dead now."

"I read Vijati, you know."

"I don't."

"Oh, so you're specializing in ancient, obscure languages that nobody speaks anymore, including you?"

"I'm not learning these languages, I'm researching lost words."

"If the whole language is dead, then all the words are lost."

"Words that used to have meanings, but that died out or survived only in idiomatic expressions. Like 'dancing bear.' What's a bear, do you know?"

"I don't know. I always thought it was some kind of graceful bird."

"Wrong. It's an ancient mammal. Known only on Earth, I think, and not brought here. Or it died out soon. It was bigger than a man, very powerful. A predator."

"And it danced?"

"The expression used to mean something absurdly clumsy. Like a dog walking on its hind legs."

"And now it means the opposite. That's weird. How could it change?"

"Because there aren't any bears. THe meaning used to be obvious, because everybody knew a bear and how clumsy it would look, dancing. But when the bears were gone, the meaning could go anywhere. Now we use it for a person who's extremely deft in getting out of an embarrassing social situation. It's the only case that we use the word bear anymore. And you see a lot of people misspelling it, too."

"Great stuff. You doing a linguistics project?"

"No."

"What's this for, then?"

"Me."

"Just collection old idioms?"

"Lost words."

"Like bear? The word isn't lost, Issya. It's the bears that are gone."

"Very good, Nyef. You get full credit for the assignment. Go away now. ~ Orson Scott Card,

87:A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide. ~ Anonymous,

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