Steven Pinker Quotes

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.

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

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

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.

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.

Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.

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

The other day, I was taking part in an audience Q&A when I was roundly scolded by a woman for 'allowing the BBC to ruin the English language.' Naturally I felt terrible, as I had no idea either that it was happening or that I was responsible.

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.

Today we speak, but first we spoke; faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote; we bite our tongues, but never bote.

Lexicographers are language reporters.

English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.

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.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

Languages are not owned by nations but by the people who use them and make them live.

Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state.

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.

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.

Unlike our neighbours on the mainland of Europe, we have resisted creating an academy to legislate over proper English. We each have our linguistic bugbear, but few of us would want to freeze our mother tongue.

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

I work with the Oxford Dictionary databases, which sounds really boring, but they're actually fascinating as they show you how current words are being used.

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.

In the middle of the 20th century, aspirations to sound 'proper' were passionately pursued. Dictionaries as late as the Seventies include many pronunciations that could cut the proverbial glass.