Linguistic Competence Quotes

I speak fluent Kosovan.

We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.

I know what the structure of the language is.

The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.

The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior.

Learning to speak, therefore, and the power it brings of intelligent converse with others, is a most impressive further step along the path of independence ... Learning to walk is especially significant, not only because it is supremely complex, but because it is done in the first year of life.

So many problems are solved simply by knowing enough verbs.

Language is one of the fundamental principles of human understanding. It is the way we interact with each other and how we grasp the world we live in. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

Usage is the best language teacher.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

I speak Vietnamese and conversational Spanish.

My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and... I dabble in a couple of languages, but I'm not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic.

I speak Hebrew excellently.

What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America, or Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.

Any woman who can’t say a four-letter word sometimes is deceitful.

By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks he can talk about language.

You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

Demetrius was wont to say that there was no difference between the words and speech of the unskilled and ignorant and the sounds and rumblings caused by the stomach being full of superfluous wind. This he said, not without reason, for, as he held, it did not in the least matter from what part of them the voice emanated, whether from the lower parts or the mouth, since the one and the other were of equal worth and importance.