Jeff Baena Quotes

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

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

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

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.

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

Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development

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.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

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

I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.

English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.

However, research in the years that followed found that in many of its important features, African American Vernacular English was becoming not less, but more different from other dialects.

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.

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

When we look at the specific effect of the Internet on language, languages asking the question, 'Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet?' the answer has to be no.

Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.

I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.

The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time.

I'm a big believer in change and embrace the fact that English is probably the fastest-moving language in the world.

Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art.

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.

Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.

American English is essentially English after having been wiped off with a dirty sponge.