David Crystal Quotes
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The question 'Why do we use language?' seems hardly to require an answer. But, as is often the way with linguistic questions, our everyday familiarity with speech and writing can make it difficult to appreciate the complexity of the skills, we have learned. This is particularly so when we try to define the range of functions to which language can be put.
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The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.
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The structural properties of the language are many and complex, but at least they are finite and fairly easy to identify: there are only so many sounds, letters, and grammatical constructions, and although there is a huge vocabulary, at least the units are determinate and manageable.
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People are very ready to criticize other people's accents. There's no correlation between accents and intelligence or accents and criminality, but people do make judgments.
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The Internet has given us 10 or 15 new styles of communication: long messages like blogging, and then short messages like texting and tweeting. I see it all as part of an expanding array of linguistic possibilities.
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As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.
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Micro computers used as word processors complement the audio facilities, enabling the interactive teaching of all four language skills reading, listening, speaking and writing.
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Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.
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There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.
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A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.
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Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.
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Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.
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You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.
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Everybody wants to say who they are and where they're from. And the easiest and cheapest and most universal way of doing that is through their accent.
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How do you spell the name of the Irish prime minister? It sounds like 'teeshuck', but we spell it 'taoiseach.' We respect foreign spellings these days - a sign of our more egalitarian times, perhaps.
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Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.
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One of the lesser-known ways of making new words is to form a blend - and a blend is when you run two words together to make a third word.
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It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.
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The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.
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It's very difficult to find even one or two criteria that you will find in every Internet situation, and the reason is that the technology constrains language in individual ways.
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Language may not determine the way we think, but it does influence the way we perceive and remember, and it affects the ease with which we perform mental tasks.
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During the later part of the 19th century, it was believed that a sound of change affected the whole of a language simultaneously: one sound system would smoothly develop into the next, and all words which contained a particular sound would be affected in the same way.
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Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.
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Online, you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet.