Gilbert Highet Quotes

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

Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else.

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.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

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.

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.

Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

Language is a living thing

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

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.

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.