Linguistic History Quotes

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. These models may be fairly sophisticated and recent, as is perhaps the case with 'motive' or 'impulse', but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity.

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

We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.

A lot of names in America and Europe have their roots in Latin and Greek words. A lot of them go back to archetypes and their stories.

Canada is said to have got its name from the two Spanish words aca and nada, signifying 'there is nothing here.'

There's so much that we just accept, but the reasons behind how certain rules came to be are so fascinating and funny, it just increases your affection for language.

In antiquity, there were three regions in southern Europe: Greece, Rome, and Ilyria. Albanian is the only survivor of the Ilyrian languages. That is why it has always intrigued the great linguists of the past.

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.

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

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.

Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?

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.

The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.

I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word 'booger' in a newspaper comic strip.