Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.
Rhythm and sounds are born with syllables.
I know what the structure of the language is.
I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.
The sound of a word is at least as important as the meaning.
The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.
I love accents in general. I'm obsessed with dialects, and I had to write a whole movie about it called 'In a World...'
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.
I'm obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects... So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct - Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver - I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.
Speech sounds can be analyzed into fundamental units called phonemes; these move around like protozoa in a drop of water, and, like protozoa, join together and split up.
English is a very expressive language.
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
At the same time we overlap, because, I do linguistics, and Ben did a first degree in Linguistics at Lancaster University, so he knows some of my subject.
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.
Syllables govern the world.
Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.
I love the English language, the colors of it, the many, many nuances, the different influences. I find German stilted, in a way, by comparison.
I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.
I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.
I am very up front about about my inability to pronounce things correctly.
Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.
We invented words; we'll tell you how they're supposed to sound.
Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.
Language makes infinite use of finite media.
