Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields: the study of language form, of language meaning, and of language in context.
- Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
- Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
- Illustrating ambiguity.
- Misattributed to Groucho Marx; first recorded on Usenet group net.jokes in 1982: Bill Banze (1982-09-07). "<bnews.mork-cb.130> Time flies...". net.jokes. (Google Groups). Retrieved on 2009-08-31. See also Fred R. Shapiro, (2006). The Yale Book of Quotations, p. 498, in which the earliest appearance of the saying is attributed to the net.jokes post. Shapiro gives the post's date as 9 July 1982, transposing the day and month of the Usenet post.
- Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
- Illustration of homonyms and homophones.
- William J. Rapaport, 1972, reported in William J. Rapaport, "A History of the Sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." (22 September 2006; accessed 23 September 2006) (archived copy).
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
- Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 460.
- Besides 'tis known he could speak Greek
As naturally as pigs squeak;
That Latin was no more difficile
Than to a blackbird 'tis to whistle.
- Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I (1663-64), Canto I, line 51.
- A Babylonish dialect
Which learned pedants much affect.
- Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I (1663-64), Canto I, line 93.
- For though to smatter ends of Greek
Or Latin be the rhetoric
Of pedants counted, and vain-glorious,
To smatter French is meritorious.
- Samuel Butler, Remains in Verse and Prose, Satire, Upon Our Ridiculous Imitation of the French, line 127. A Greek proverb condemns the man of two tongues.
- I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth.
- Lord Byron, Beppo (1818), Stanza 44.
- * * * Philologists, who chase
A panting syllable through time and space
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.
- William Cowper, Retirement, line 691.
- He Greek and Latin speaks with greater ease
Than hogs eat acorns, and tame pigeons peas.
- Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex, Panegyric on Tom Coriate.
- Lash'd into Latin by the tingling rod.
- John Gay, The Birth of the Squire, line 46.
- Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.
- He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst und Alterthum.
- Small Latin, and less Greek.
- Ben Jonson, To the Memory of Shakespeare.
- Omnia Græce!
Cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine.
- Everything is Greek, when it is more shameful to be ignorant of Latin.
- Juvenal, Satires, VI, 187. (Second line said to be spurious).
- Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.
- Jean de La Bruyère, The Characters or Manners of the Present Age (1688), Chapter XII.
- C'est de l'hebreu pour moi.
- It is Hebrew to me.
- Molière, L'Etourdi, Act III, scene 3.
- Negates artifex sequi voces.
- He attempts to use language which he does not know.
- Persius, Satires, Prologue, XI.
- This is your devoted friend, sir, the manifold linguist.
- Away with him, away with him! he speaks Latin.
- O! good my lord, no Latin;
I'm not such a truant since my coming,
As not to know the language I have liv'd in.
- But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.
- Speaks three or four languages word for word without a book.
- By your own report
- Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic, Act I, scene 2.
Last modified on 25 May 2012, at 02:24↑Jump back a section
- We are caught in a traffic jam of discursive thought.
- Chogyam Trungpa