Wilhelm von Humboldt Quotes

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.

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

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.

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

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

To go from "gnarly" to "literally," that shows I'm growing up, right?

A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.

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

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.

Language changes very fast.

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

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.

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.

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.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

The one thing - apart from assumptions about German - that I have to challenge frequently is people assuming that lexicographers are fierce protectors of the language when in fact our job is not to put a lid on it.

Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.

The truth is that only 1% of all new words are totally new, and of those an even smaller percentage are conjured up out of thin air. The vast majority of coinages are the product of some kind of repurposing, and the result has always been a mix of tradition and innovation.

The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.

Friction makes sparks and sparks start creative conflagrations.

I think the important thing about staying creative and staying sharp and original is not to look back too much.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.