Language

"the errors of Grammarians have arisen from supposing all words to be immediately either the signs of things or the signs of ideas: whereas in fact many words are merely abbreviations employed for despatch, and are the signs of other words. And that these are the artificial wings of Mercury, by means of which the Argus eyes of philosophy have been cheated."

"I learned how important grammar is, that part of the understanding process is grammatical. That’s how I taught myself to write prose. I kept learning and learning. I’d come into my class and say, “Guess what I found out last night. Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.” I learned that grammar was not arbitrary, that it served a purpose, that it helped to form the ways we thought, that it could be freeing as well as restrictive."

"Ego sum rex Romanus, et supra grammaticam."

"Language is not a plant that rises and falls, lives and decays. It's a tool that's perfectly adapted by the people using it. Get on with living and talking."

"To have a public policy that a certain culture or language should be preserved shows a fundamental misunderstanding. I don't see why it's in the public good to preserve Manx or Cornish or any other language for that matter. In the end, whether or not a language is viable is very simple. If a language is one that people don't participate in, it's not a language anymore."

"About 6,000 different languages are spoken around the world. But the Foundation for Endangered Languages estimates that between 500 and 1,000 of those are spoken by only a handful of people. And every year the world loses around 25 mother tongues. That equates to losing 250 languages over a decade - a sad prospect for some."

"And when languages are lost most of the knowledge that went with them gets lost. People do care about identity as they want to be different. Nowadays we want access to everything but we don't want to be thought of as no more than people on the other side of the world."

"In one sense you could call it a cultural loss. But that makes no sense because cultural forms are lost all the time. To say every cultural form should exist forever is ridiculous. And when governments try to prop languages up, it shows a desire to cling to the past rather than move forwards."

"The staying power of endangered languages must be intimately tied to a thousand intimate or small-scale network processes, processes too gratifying and rewarding to surrender even if they do not quite amount to the pursuit of higher reaches of power and modernity."

"It might be said with a certain metaphoric license that languages are seldom admired to death but are frequently despised to death."

"...for endangered languages must take into account the potential of economic issues to outweigh all others combined, although this a potential, not an absolute: ranking economic concerns higher than other variables is not tantamount to assigning economic factors complete supremacy."

"The Gaelic-speaking East Sutherland fisherfolk have in one sense already been proven 'wrong', in that some of the youngest members of their own kin circles have begun to berate them for choosing not to transmit the ancestral language and so allowing it to die."

"The Foundation for Endangered Languages supports, enables and assists the documentation, protection and promotion of endangered languages."

"The majority of endangered languages come from oral culture, where converting the language to a written form poses certain consequences for the continued use of these languages."

"You probably know that many of the world's plants and animals are in danger of extinction, but did you know that many human languages are in danger of becoming extinct, too? Globalization has helped to make the world a smaller place. But it has also contributed to the loss of many languages around the world. Every two weeks another language disappears forever! Once a language is lost, humanity loses a part of our rich heritage. Helping to preserve endangered languages is important to keep traditions alive."

"World Population is 6,716,664,407, Living Languages are 7,105 comprising institutional: 682, Developing: 1,534, Vigorous: 2,502, In Trouble: 1,481, Dying: 906."

"...that parents are no longer teaching the language to their children and are not using it actively in everyday matters."

"What are you waiting for? Don’t ask permission to save your language. Just do it."

"According to Ethnologue, there are approximately 7,105 living languages in the world."

"An alternate version: First of all, never ask permission to save your language. Do not … If there are three or four of you in the community who want to start a small tribal language school, then go ahead and do it, but if you ask permission, what do you think you will be told? … Second, don't wait around for some big federal grant. Do it . The Hebrew language was once spoken by only a few thousand..."

"Languages are always changing but in many cases the life of a language ends. In many areas of the world, economic, military, social and other pressures are causing communities to stop speaking their traditional languages, and turn to other, typically more dominant, languages. This can be a social, cultural and scientific disaster because languages express the unique knowledge, history and worldview of their communities; and each language is a specially evolved variation of the human capacity for communication."

"Serious wordinistas will be waiting for the linguistic Oscars, when the American Dialect Society makes its selection in January."

"While astrophysicists were downgrading the cosmic object we call Pluto, the American Dialect Society, which is more than a century old, was upgrading the status of the word Pluto to a verb, making it their 17th annual 'Word of the Year' for 2006."

"The American Dialect Society (ADS; americandialect.org), identifies the most influential words of the year. For example, ADS members voted tweet as the Word of the Year for 2009 and google as the word of the decade. Ten years earlier, Y2K was the top choice, web was the word of the decade, and jazz was the word of the century."

"Since 1889, dialectologists in English-speaking North America have affiliated themselves with the American Dialect Society, an association which in its first constitution defined its object as "the investigation of the spoken English of the United States and Canada, and incidentally of other non-aboriginal dialects spoken in the same countries.""

"Flexitarian was voted Most Useful Word in 2003 by the American Dialect Society, a fact widely publicized in the press."

"Members of the American Dialect Society (www.americandialect.org) study English language use among people living in North America. They analyze how other languages influence English-speaking North Americans, and how, in turn, North Americans influence speakers of other languages."

"The initial hope of the American Dialect Society was to provide a body of data from which a dialect dictionary or series of linguistic maps might be derived."

"The early work of the American Dialect Society reflects the wide reach and the overlapping linguistic and literary interests centered on language study at the end of the century."

"The American Dialect Society was founded in 1889 with the goal of compiling a dialect dictionary of the United States."

"We dismissed one potential problem—that newspapers wouldn't print the term if it won—on the grounds that we shouldn't censor ourselves. And indeed, in the afternoon's voting, santorum did win, but many newspapers simply skipped this category in their coverage. So much for academic freedom."

"Language changes, and you cannot stop it. It's just like any other part of human culture."

"The term goes back 50 years, but you can't turn on the radio or television without hearing about 'weapons of mass destruction'."

"There is no scientific method of determining which words or phrases will be named words-of-the-year. It's kind of like Time magazine determining the whistle-blowers were the person-of-the-year. There is no objective way of determining it. It's all done with a show of hands."

"When you have investment companies losing billions of dollars over something like bundled subprime loans, then you have to consider whether it's important. You probably also want to think about paying off that third mortgage."

"[D]edicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it."

"Today, if somebody comes up with a new phrase or word, it is spread instantly. Instead of weeks and months, now it takes milliseconds. It doesn't mean these terms will last forever, just that they're suddenly here."

"Yeah, that was a surprise to me. I thought it might be something like texting or blog, but people decided that Google - and the argument from the floor from one of our members was that a lot of people blog, millions of people blog, but everybody googles, young and old. It's so generic that people go to Yahoo and google. So, it's google with a lower-case G."

"You'd have to ask Bill Clinton or Bob Dole why it was so important. We are merely recognizing its importance."

"It's a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement. The movement itself was powered by the word."

"Systematic American dialect research began with the formation of the American Dialect Society in 1889."

"Since 1990, the American Dialect Society has included in its annual meeting a vote on Words of the Year, the words that were most notable, prominent, and characteristic of the discourse of the year just past."

"Gewöhnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur Worte hört, Es müsse sich dabei doch auch was denken."

"I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue; I will keep my mouth with a bridle, while the wicked is before me."

"Es macht das Volk sich auch mit Worten Lust."

"A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger."

"We can judge the intent of the parties only by their words."

"Words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them."

"In Words, as Fashions, the same Rule will hold; Alike Fantastick, if too New, or Old; Be not the first by whom the New are try'd, Nor yet the last to lay the Old aside."

"Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found."