Charlton Laird Quotes

12 quotes in 185 categories

• If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.
• Man can be defined, if one wishes, as a languag-ized mammal.
• Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.
• Amoebas, once they have themselves well pulled in two, go their ways-they practice divorce, but no remarriage.
• Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but…
• Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most…
• The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday…
• Language is a living thing. It must survive in men's minds and on their tongues if it survives at all.
• You and I who read and write books have very little effect upon language. We may think about it, write about it, and read about…
• Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they…
• The great arbiters of language are the women who speak it in the presence of children... What the women pass on to the next generation…
• Jazz was formerly a crude term for indulging in an action which in polite society is referred to, if at all, only with such vague…

Browse Charlton Laird Quotes by Category