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Linguists Quotes

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Linguists Quotes

“John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's.”

GodReligionAtheismSelf ConceptAtheistsLinguistsSocialistsRichard DawkinsHumanistsBiologistsLrbFriedrich EngelsJohn HodgsonMaterialists
Author:David Craig
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“The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months.”

KnowsChildrenThreeLanguageHoursWorkFourMonthsBecomingSixBenefitsResearchAdultsDifficultyConstantTongueFasterDisagreeDozenSix MonthsTheoreticalExperimentationThree MonthsUnderestimatedFluentLinguists
Author:Tim Ferriss
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“A drone strike is a terror weapon, we don't talk about it that way. It is; just imagine you are walking down the street and you don't know whether in 5 minutes there is going to be an explosion across the street from some place up in the sky that you can't see. Somebody will be killed, and whoever is around will be killed, maybe you'll be injured if you're there. That is a terror weapon. It terrorizes villages, regions, huge areas. It's the most massive terror campaign going on by a long shot.”

IfsKnowsWayLongImagineSkyStreetsMinutesHugeWalkingWeaponsShotsAreasTerrorStrikesCampaignsRegionsMassiveVillageSocialistExplosionsInjuredDronesLinguistsLong Shots
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. In that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians. To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.”

IfsMeanEyeSpeakLanguageRaceBloodStageHairSpeechBonesSinnerAgain And AgainGrammarDictionarySkullsLinguistsScandinavians
Author:Max Muller
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“But in reading Shakespeare and in reading about Edward de Vere, it's quite apparent that when you read these works that whoever penned this body of work was firstly well-travelled, secondly a multi-linguist and thirdly someone who had an innate knowledge of the inner workings and the mechanisms of a very secret and paranoid Elizabethan court. Edward de Vere ticks those three boxes and many more. William of Stratford gave his wife a bed when he died [his second best bed].”

WellsBodyThreeReadingSecretWifeBedDiedCourtBoxesMechanismInnateParanoidTickSecond BestLinguistsElizabethanReading Shakespeare
Author:Rhys Ifans
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“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.”

WorldShouldTryingMindHumansLooksJobsTeachCasesFiguresCreationGloryBehaveHuman MindMessyLinguisticsBiologistLinguists
Book:In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language
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“One of the things that is nice about these old pastors - they were young at the time - who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is.”

PeopleThinkingShouldMindArtRealSchoolYoungHumanityNiceMiddleExampleCollegeWestBroadsPastorLiberal ArtsLinguistsLiberal Arts College
Author:Marilynne Robinson
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“When I think about discussions at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a group which includes not only philosophers and psychologists, but also computer scientists and linguists, it is noteworthy that one can't always tell just from the content of particular contributions from the audience, whether a given questioner is a philosopher or an empirical scientist.”

ThinkingPhilosophyGivenAudiencePsychologyGroupsParticularComputerScientistPhilosopherDiscussionContributionPsychologistLinguists
Author:Hilary Kornblith
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“Even if you close your eyes, you'll still hear Donald Trump sniffing. Linguists might call [these visuals] paralinguistics, every form of information including facial gestures and facial features. Obviously these things get scrutinized in tremendous detail, so that a cough can be of outsized importance. [But] that's all part of the package.”

IfsStillsMightEyeFormInformationTrumpImportanceIncludingDetailsFeaturesVisualsGesturesPackagesFacialLinguistsSniffingFacial Features
Author:Ben Zimmer
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“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.”

IfsWorldFoundLanguageStructureObjectivesMapsLinksTerritoryLinguisticsLinguists
Book:Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
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“If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”

PeopleIfsInspirationalBelieveHateBeliefFreedomRightsRelationshipExpressionCommunicationWise WordsHeroSpeechDon't BelieveHuman RightsEqualityLibertarianCivil RightsDespiseCensorshipFree SpeechFreedom Of SpeechFirst AmendmentFreedom And LibertyDespisedFreedom LibertyCivil LibertiesFreedom Of ExpressionLinguisticsFreedom Of The PressHuman FreedomLimiting GovernmentRights And FreedomsLimited FreedomPolitical WillHate SpeechPolitical FreedomCensoredCensoringAmerica FreedomLinguistsLimiting FreedomLimiting Freedom Of ExpressionLiberty Of SpeechBelieve In UsFirst Amendment RightsFreedom Of Speech And Expression
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“These microscopic organisms form an entire world composed of species, families and varieties whose history, which has barely begun to be written, is already fertile in prospects and findings of the highest importance. The names of these organisms are very numerous and will have to be defined and in part discarded. The word microbe which has the advantage of being shorter and carrying a more general meaning, and of having been approved by my illustrious friend, M. Littré, the most competent linguist in France, is one we will adopt.”

WorldFormScienceNamesWrittenFindingsHighestAdvantageImportanceSpeciesDefinedVarietyFranceApprovalOrganismsCompetentApprovedFertileProspectsDiscardedNomenclatureMicrobesLinguists
Author:Louis Pasteur
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“Music is a manifestation of the human spirit, similar to language. Its greatest practitioners have conveyed to mankind things not possible to say in any other language. If we do not want these things to remain dead treasures, we must do our utmost to make the greatest possible number of people understand their idiom.”

PeopleIfsWantInspirationalHumansSpiritLanguageUnderstandingNumbersMusicMankindHuman NatureMusic IsRemainsTreasureManifestationComposerHuman SpiritIdiomLinguists
Author:Zoltan Kodaly
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“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.”

ShouldBelieveI CanEndsLanguageI BelieveResultsNumbersEffortClearAchieveSubjectsCenturyRevolutionResearchAgreePreparedPhilosopherProvenCompetentLinguisticsSyntaxUnificationSemanticsLinguists
Author:John Searle
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“Last week a former Royal Marine who is the boyfriend of the model Kelly Brooks crashed into a bus stop while driving a van carrying a load of dead badgers. I mention this solely to remind you that linguists are not kidding when they say … that your command of English enables you to understand sentences that have never occurred before in the entire history of the human species.”

HumansLastsWeekModelsSpeciesSentencesDrivingCommandFormerBusLoadRoyalMarineVansBrooksHuman SpeciesLinguistsBadgersBus Stops
Author:Geoffrey K. Pullum
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“Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.”

YearsChildrenKidsFormUsedLiteratureTakenRecordsExampleShapesEvidenceDown AndBlowDataMy ChildrenLinguists
Author:David Crystal
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