Best Linguistics Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“If translation is realignment, what specifically is getting realigned? Our perceptions, our literary categories, our languages? I would say it's the text's relationship to its audience-who is speaking, who is addressed, where the text is "pointing." Any text can, and any good text will, redirect our perceptions, redefine the genre it's working within, and change the resources or enlarge the scope of the language it's written in, but the particular "realignment" that takes place in translation refers to the vector pointing from author to reader.”

“It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.”

“Language disguises thought.”

“Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. - Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.”

“when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.”