“The structural closeness of languages to each other has often been thought to be an important factor in FLL (foreign language learning). If the L2 [the foreign language] is structurally similar to the L1 [the original language], it is claimed, learning should be easier than in cases where the L2 is very different. However, it is not possible to correlate linguistic difference and learning difficulty in any straightforward way, and even the basic task of quantifying linguistic difference proves to be highly complex, because of the many variables involved.”

— David Crystal

Source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 1987, p. 371

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David Crystal 24

British linguist and writer 1941

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“Saussure took the sign as the organizing concept for linguistic structure, using it to express the conventional nature of language in the phrase "l'arbitraire du signe". This has the effect of highlighting what is, in fact, the one point of arbitrariness in the system, namely the phonological shape of words, and hence allows the non-arbitrariness of the rest to emerge with greater clarity. An example of something that is distinctly non-arbitrary is the way different kinds of meaning in language are expressed by different kinds of grammatical structure, as appears when linguistic structure is interpreted in functional terms.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

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1970s and later

“I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
Context: I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.

“I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.”

Donald Davidson (philosopher) (1917–2003) scriitor amator

Davidson, Donald. " A nice derangement of epitaphs http://www.hf.uio.no/csmn/english/research/news-and-events/events/davidson_derangement.pdf." Philosophical grounds of rationality: Intentions, categories, ends 4 (1986): 157.

“Cases where several nations speak the same language are treated in linguistics as pluricentric languages.”

Snježana Kordić (1964) Croatian linguist

Fälle, in denen mehrere Nationen eine Sprache sprechen, werden in der Sprachwissenschaft als plurizentrische Sprachen behandelt.
[Kordić, Snježana, w:Snježana Kordić, Snježana Kordić, Moderne Nationalbezeichnungen und Texte aus vergangenen Jahrhunderten, Zeitschrift für Balkanologie, 46, 1, 41, 2010, http://www.zeitschrift-fuer-balkanologie.de/index.php/zfb/article/view/222/222, 0044-2356] (in German)

“The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 62

“[My aim is] to design logic as a calculating discipline, especially to give access to the exact handling of relative concepts, and, from then on, by emancipation from the routine claims of natural language, to withdraw any fertile soil from "cliché" in the field of philosophy as well. This should prepare the ground for a scientific universal language that, widely differing from linguistic efforts like Volapük [a universal language like Esperanto, very popular in Germany at the time], looks more like a sign language than like a sound language.”

Ernst Schröder (1841–1902) German mathematician

Source: V. Peckhaus, "19th Century Logic between Philosophy and Mathematics," Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 5 (1999), 433-450.

“The most important language of personal joy is the often complex linguistics of silence”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All Will be Well (2004)

“Croatian linguists proscribe words that are common to the majority of the Croatian people just to make a difference to the language in Serbia.”

Snježana Kordić (1964) Croatian linguist

I linguisti croati rifiutano le parole in uso presso la maggior parte della popolazione solo per dare artificiosamente corpo ad una diversità nei confronti della lingua parlata in Serbia.
[Kordić, Snježana, w:Snježana Kordić, Snježana Kordić, Purismo e censura linguistica in Croazia oggi, Studi Slavistici, 5, 284, 2008, http://www.fupress.net/index.php/ss/article/view/2943/8774, 1824-7601] (in Italian)

“The distinction between "language" and "speech" rests on easily observable facts. The theoretical aspect of the issue has been raised in contemporary literature only by de Saussure, although in the terminological sense all the languages (I refer here to our cultural circle and its traditions), beginning with the distinction … lingua and sermo in Latin, accept the difference between "language" as a system of linguistic facts and "speech" as the name of a type of action. Following de Saussure, that theoretical distinction has been adopted in all contemporary linguistics. Gardiner distinguishes between speech as an activity with clearly utilitarian ends in view, and language as a precise knowledge pertaining to communication by means of verbal signs'*. The differentiation has been adopted in the Marxist literature of the subject, linguistic, psychological, etc. In his Psychology (in Russian) S. L. Rubinshtein defines speech as language functioning in the context of individual consciousness, and compares the difference between speech and language to the difference between individual and social consciousness.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 316

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Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Description and explanation in linguistics"
Quotes 2000s, 2007-09, (3rd ed., 2009)

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