David Crystal Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.
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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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We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there.
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Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
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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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The main metaphor that is used to explain the historical relationship is that of the language family or family tree.
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Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.
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Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.
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Of all the mediums that influence language, I think film is the one that has the most effect. Not so much from the point of view of pronunciation and grammar. I don't think we pick up very many sounds and grammatical instructions from the films we see - but the catchphrases.
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The subject matter ranges from subtle forms of intellectual sarcasm and humor to the crudest possible attacks on a person's courage, sexual prowess, or relatives. At one level, attacks may be subtle and indirect, involving allusion and figurative speech; at another, there may be explicit taunts, boasts, name calling, and jokes at the other's expense.
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When we look at the specific effect of the Internet on language, languages asking the question, 'Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet?' the answer has to be no.
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The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.