Classification Quote by Joseph H. Greenberg

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic -…

— Joseph Brodsky

“Containing several hundred languages, among them several world languages, the Indo-European language family is the language family with the most speakers world-wide.”

— Sören Eberhardt

Languages are the pedigree of nations.

— Samuel Johnson

The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

— Lewis Thomas

It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that…

— Noam Chomsky

The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

— Charles Darwin

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I never thought of that one, that linguistics could be driving cultural things. There are some thoughts that that does happen in humans, that…

— Hal Whitehead

“Languages have complicated family trees, you know—mixed marriages, stepchildren, even bastards. There are countless scandals in the history of languages, many murders, much incest.”

— Lauren Kate

Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the pop-biology that…

— Noam Chomsky

The task that we face today is to understand the language of nature.

— Paul Stamets