Susie Dent Quotes

The ways in which language changes never ceases to interest me.

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

English is a very expressive language.

Language is something that I take great interest in.

I love the English language, the colors of it, the many, many nuances, the different influences. I find German stilted, in a way, by comparison.

Language is ever on the move, and most days, I check out the 'Urban Dictionary' where anyone can invent a new and useful word or phrase.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

Languages are true analytical methods.

Language makes infinite use of finite media.

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.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

One of the joys of language is its constant evolution, and a lexicographer's job is both to track new words and to reassess those from the past.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.

I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.