Linguistic Roots Quotes

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was pronouncing it 'Cal-LEE-fornia,' he was right - he just didn't realize he was accidentally speaking Spanish.

Demon mean knowledge in Greek, especially about the material world. Science means knowledge in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further

Lots of people have expressed consternation that I haven't gotten rid of Southern accent, but I just never saw any reason to lose the flavor that I grew up with. I enjoy saying some things with a Southern accent.

My name means freedom in Irish.

I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.

When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his cap, or head, and Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.

Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

The Greek word for Christ is Kristos, which is, let's face it, Krishna, and Kristos is the same name actually.

Words have life and must be cared for. If they are stolen for ugly uses or careless slang or false promotion work, they need to be brought back to their original meaning - back to their roots.

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

Tamil is my mother tongue.

Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west.

My primary tongue, I would call North-West Mercian.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

I was always told that Hoosier came from when settlers in the state, when a stranger came on their property they'd say, "Who's there? Who's there?" So people that were from Indiana were the people that said "Who's there?" But what do I know? I don't read or interact with people outside the Internet.

But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.

My mother tongue is Telugu. I was born and brought up in Tamil Nadu.

I'm a bit of a melting pot, I try to speak British, but there's some European lilt - a not-so-conventional one because I'm Belgian, from the Flemish part. Dutch was my mother language, and I learned English, and I speak French, too.

I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

My mother tongue is German.