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.)
Back to Quotations page.