Sequoyah

Quotations Concerning Linguists (and Language Creators)

La plus part des occasions des troubles du monde sont grammairiennes.
The greater part of the world's troubles are due to disputes about grammar.
~ Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book 2


Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
~ Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (Chomsky cites this sentence as one which makes no semantic sense but can make grammatical sense.)


Suppose someone to assert: The gostak distims the doshes. You do not know what this means; nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the doshes are distimmed by the gostak.
~ C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning
(This sentence illustrates the ability to discern relative meanings of words from a sentence's construction.)


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