linguists-from-the-united-states

"Realizing the difficulty of painting in word colors a land so strange, so wonderful, and so vast in its features, in the weakness of my descriptive powers I have sought refuge in graphic illustration."

"Economy in speech is the force by which its development has been accomplished, and it divides itself properly into economy of utterance and economy of thought. Economy of utterance has had to do with the phonic constitution of words; economy of thought has developed the sentence."

"In Seneca the north is "the sun never goes there," and this sentence may be used as adjective or noun; in such cases noun, adjective, verb, and adverb are found as one vocable or word, and the four parts of speech are undifferentiated."

"We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly."

"In Ute the name for bear is "he seizes," or "the hugger." In this case the verb is used for the noun, and in so doing the Indian names the bear by predicating one of his characteristics. Thus noun and verb are undifferentiated."

"Possible ideas and thoughts are vast in number. A distinct word for every distinct idea and thought would require a vast vocabulary. The problem in language is to express many ideas and thoughts with comparatively few words."

"On the walls, and back many miles into the country, numbers of monument-shaped buttes are observed. So we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features—carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments. From which of these features shall we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon."

"The history of the world is replete with illustrations to the effect that the greater the ignorance the greater the abomination of unconforming opinion, and the greater the knowledge the greater the charity for dissenting opinions."

"Years of drought and famine come and years of flood and famine come, and the climate is not changed with dance, libation or prayer."

"Honest investigation is but the application of common sense to the solution of the unknown. Science does not wait on Genius, but is the companion of Industry."

"Many years have passed since the exploration, and those who were boys with me in the enterprise are—ah, most of them are dead, and the living are gray with age. Their bronzed, hardy, brave faces come before me as they appeared in the vigor of life; their lithe but powerful forms seem to move around me; and the memory of the men and their heroic deeds, the men and their generous acts, overwhelms me with a joy that seems almost a grief, for it starts a fountain of tears. I was a maimed man; my right arm was gone; and these brave men, these good men, never forgot it. In every danger my safety was their first care, and in every waking hour some kind service was rendered me, and they transfigured my misfortune into a boon."

"The exploration was not made for adventure, but purely for scientific purposes, geographic and geologic, and I had no intention of writing an account of it, but only of recording the scientific results."

"Indian nouns are extremely connotive; that is, the name does more than simply denote the thing to which it belongs; in denoting the object, it also assigns to it some quality or characteristic."

"The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence."

"Scientific education is catholic; it embraces the whole field of human learning. No student can master all knowledge in the short years of his academic life, but a young man of ability and industry may reasonably hope to master the outlines of science, obtain a deep insight into the methods of scientific research, and at the same time secure an initiation into some one of the departments of science, in such a manner that he may fully appreciate the multitude of facts upon which scientific conclusions rest, and be prepared to enter the field of scientific research himself and make additions to the sum of human knowledge."

"On my return from the first exploration of the canyons of the Colorado, I found that...a story of disaster had been circulated, with many particulars of hardship and tragedy, so that it was currently believed throughout the United States that all the members of the party were lost save one. A good friend of mine had gathered a great number of obituary notices, and it was interesting and rather flattering to me to discover the high esteem in which I had been held by the people of the United States. In my supposed death I had attained to a glory which I fear my continued life has not fully vindicated."

"Scientific education is a training in mental integrity. All along the history of culture from savagery to modern civilization men have imagined what ought to be, and then have tried to prove it true. This is the very spirit of metaphysic philosophy. When the imagination is not disciplined by unrelenting facts, it invents falsehood, and, when error has thus been invented, the heavens and the earth are ransacked for its proof."

"The verb is relatively of much greater importance in an Indian tongue than in a civilized language."

"The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock—cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms; rocks everywhere, and no vegetation, no soil, no sand. In long, gentle curves the river winds about these rocks."

"In science nothing can be permanently accepted but that which is true, and whatever is accepted as true is challenged again and again. It is an axiom in science that no truth can be so sacred that it may not be questioned. When that which has been accepted as true has the least doubt thrown upon it, scientific men at once re-examine the subject. No opinion is sacred. “It ought to be” is never heard in scientific circles. "It seems to be" and "we think it is" is the modest language of scientific literature."

"The mountain slopes...are covered with dense forests of pines and firs. The lakes are often fringed with beautiful aspens, and when the autumn winds come their golden leaves are carried over the landscape in clouds of resplendent sheen."

"In the past, history has been devoted chiefly to the exploits of heroes and the story of wars; but history is now being speedily reorganized and rewritten upon a scientific basis, to exhibit the growth of culture in all its grand departments. History itself is now a science, and is no longer an art in which men exploit in rhetorical paragraphs."

"The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail. The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse. The Cyclopean forms which result from the sculpture of tempests through ages too long for man to compute, are wrought into endless details, to describe which would be a task equal in magnitude to that of describing the stars of the heavens or the multitudinous beauties of the forest with its traceries of foliage presented by oak and pine and poplar, by beech and linden and hawthorn, by tulip and lily and rose, and by fern and moss and lichen. Besides the elements of form, there are elements of color, for here the colors of the heavens are rivaled by the colors of the rocks. The rainbow is not more replete with hues. But form and color do not exhaust all the divine qualities of the Grand Canyon. It is the land of music. The river thunders in perpetual roar, swelling in floods of music when the storm gods play upon the rocks and fading away in soft and low murmurs when the infinite blue of heaven is unveiled. With the melody of the great tide rising and falling, swelling and vanishing forever, other melodies are heard in the gorges of the lateral canyons, while the waters plunge in the rapids among the rocks or leap in great cataracts. Thus the Grand Canyon is a land of song. Mountains of music swell in the rivers, hills of music billow in the creeks, and meadows of music murmur in the rills that ripple over the rocks. Altogether it is a symphony of multitudinous melodies. All this is the music of waters. The adamant foundations of the earth have been wrought into a sublime harp, upon which the clouds of the heavens play with mighty tempests or with gentle showers.The glories and the beauties of form, color and sound unite in the Grand Canyon—forms unrivaled even by the mountains, colors that vie with sunsets, and sounds that span the diapason from tempest to tinkling raindrop, from cataract to bubbling fountain. But more, it is a vast district of country. Were it a valley plain it would make a State. It can be seen only in parts from hour to hour and from day to day and from week to week and from month to month. A year scarcely suffices to see it all. It has infinite variety, and no part is ever duplicated. Its colors, though many and complex, at any instant change with the ascending and declining sun; lights and shadows appear and vanish with the passing clouds, and the changing seasons mark their passage in changing colors. You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths. It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained, never again to be equaled on the hither side of Paradise."

"Is it that we think the brain too small a place to hold more than one language at a time? That room for Spanish or Navajo will leave too little room for English? Is it that we fear that other ways of speaking will lead to an understanding of other ways of life, and so weaken commitment to our own? Is it perhaps that command of languages is assigned to a sphere of culture reserved for girls and women, something not suitable for boys and men?Whatever the reasons, the United States is a country rich in many things, but poor in knowledge of itself with regard to language."

"Those of us who have witnessed the marvellous development of the great motion picture industry, who have perhaps played in our childhood with the strangely named toys, which produced the crude effects of movement of a few printed figures on a short strip of paper, have lived through the most astonishing drama of all that the moving picture world has produced. Its own development to one of the principal industries of the world is a great romance. It is a romance told by thousands of films all over the civilized world; every film is a short chapter in the great story."

"My colleagues and I looked at the classic case of Shakespeare we looked at a play for which scholars disputed whether Shakespeare or his contemporary Christopher Marlowe wrote or if they each wrote different parts of it."

"I grew up as a science and math nerd."

"I discovered a love of computing in high school, when personal computing was still fairly new the early 80s."

"The idea that computers could be programmed to lead to intelligence, as in the robots in the science fiction I enjoyed."

"Early in my work on using computers to analyze authorship figuring out who wrote a document based on the wording and grammar."

"I fell in love with the field of artificial intelligence as an undergraduate in applied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon."

"To our great surprise and excitement, our results showed unequivocally that Marlowe had written the entire play."

"I aimed at a research career and did my doctorate researching machine learning for mobile robots under the late brilliant Drew McDermott at Yale."

"We want to produce well rounded data scientists."

"Students coming in for a data scientist course are not looking for a real narrow technical focus but a broader in interdisciplinary approach."

"They may still not understand it involves learning to talk with people who are not technical."

"I hope they will learn how important these skills can be."

"I discovered a love of integrating the precise and mathematical in computing with the personal and meaningful in language."

"I switched research directions towards natural language processing, using computers to understand human language."

"The breadth of the field, combining math, computing, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and more, is what has kept me in it for decades."

"I saw the growing interest in data science as a distinct field, and proposed to the Illinois Tech university leadership."

"We are talking to people in industry who want to do adjunct teaching for some courses that are down to earth."

"I recruited collaborators, led the development of a curriculum, and shepherded the proposal through a gauntlet of curriculum committees."

"I discovered a love for designing and implementing processes the help people learn and perform, and for building effective teams to address complex problems."

"What matters? What is worth establishing and maintaining? Survival. Only survival. Individual survival is first; then comes the survival of the family, the clan, the tribe. These are immediately comprehensible. Beyond them lie ever larger and more diffuse, long-term loyalties."

"Christianity and the other Middle Eastern religions were certainly alike in one respect: they all sweated over "sin." The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead had a great judgment scene, Lessing had read somewhere. When you died, Thoth, the ibis-headed god, weighed your heart against the Feather of Truth. You confessed your sins before Osiris, the Lord of the Dead, and if you lied you were lunch for a crocodile-headed monster. Needless to say, this sternly moral scene was followed by other chapters that told you how to lie safely to the Forty-Two Judges of the Dead, how to con Osiris, how to fool old Croco-Smile, and how to sashay on into the Fields of the Blessed without anybody laying a hand, claw, or tentacle on you! Why did all the religions from that part of the world bother postulating an omnipotent, omniscient god who handed down iron-clad commandments—only to spend the rest of history figuring ways to bamboozle him? Must be something in the Middle Eastern psyche."

"Ah, but what about persons in our society who are not members of our ethnos? I shall not mince words. We are not responsible for members of such groups. This is our society. We live here, and we shall govern here. We thus strongly encourage others to go and live where their own ethnos-groups hold sway. We see no need for them in our land."

"Tolkien had this Britisher's sort of attitude that religion is something you do in church, and... It doesn't really do that much to your daily life... Whereas I’d been living and working in societies where religion is just permeating the atmosphere... Even the simple villagers are behaving in ways that they consider related directly to religion, rather than secular politics or something like this."

"I once spent three months in Hong Kong long ago – compulsorily: I had lost my passport in Singapore, and the American embassy people did not believe I was an American until they checked my fingerprints with Washington. I thus ended up in Hong Kong waiting for my new passport to arrive. I was nearly penniless and lived quite comfortably in a brothel in Kowloon – without the services of the girls, I must add. They were all very nice to me, and my few remaining dollars were enough to pay for rice and an occasional bowl of vegetables. I thus saw Hong Kong from the underside, as it were. When my passport finally arrived, I managed to catch a Norwegian freighter going home to San Francisco. All of this was rather jolly, and the British police in Hong Kong were understanding. Everybody seemed to think I was either an agent for the Russians or an escaped Nazi war criminal, although I speak neither Russian nor German. Just my "good looks", I guess."

"We will not tolerate either mongrelization or the proliferation of unwanted and unassimilable persons who can never fully participate in our society. Should such people refuse to leave, then we will enforce our will with whatever means are needed. No excuses, no wishy-washy hypocrisy! We will not be blackmailed info being the Great White Father of all of the unfortunates of the world! Let other ethnos groups care for their own, just as we care for ours."