Roman Jakobson Quotes

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

We must plow through the whole of language.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

Two languages in one brain? No one can live at that speed!

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.

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.

My parents were both Spanish-speakers and they used to speak to me and my siblings in Spanish and we'd answer them in English.

I grew up in a community that was bilingual. I've done it for a while, singing in both languages.

I speak English with my dad and Swedish with my mom; it's quite schizophrenic.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

If you spend your time trying to learn English, you fall behind in your course content… I know because when I came here I could not speak English. So that was the idea of Congress when we passed bi-lingual education. But that was to only go on for a short time—one and one half years. But many of the bi-lingual education programs of today go on for year after year and they are destructive because the primary objective is to learn English.

With sociolinguistics, after covering the basics of the field, I focused on discourse analysis.

Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.