« All Language Quotes · Steven Pinker's Page
Language Quotes by Steven Pinker
- The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude…
- People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit…
- When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very…
- Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the…
- For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to…
- Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for…
- Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying…
- Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual…
- Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.
- Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
- People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
- Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer…
- Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply…
- An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar…
- As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published…
- Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions…
- I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that…
- Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly.…
- One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at…
- Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts…
More Language Quotes
- It's no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis… — Andre Agassi
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- Part of what makes a language 'alive' is its constant evolution. I would hate to think Britain would ever emulate France, where… — Joanne Kathleen Rowling
- If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and… — A A Milne
- I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to… — Mitch Albom
- In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement… — Aristotle
- The finest command of language is often shown by saying nothing. — Roger Babson
- In any area of the U.N. we... have to agree on certain language that can represent the same spirit, but that can… — Michelle Bachelet