Quotes about pronunciation

A collection of quotes on the topic of pronunciation, word, wording, first.

Quotes about pronunciation

“3. Finally, we are contemporaries of a new departure in the doctrine of truth, following the dissolution of its relation of organic concretion to knowledge. It is noticeable, after the fact, that to this day veracity, as I call it, has reigned without quarter: however strange it may seem, it is quite appropriate to say that truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere). Moreover, this theme of truth crosses the paths of Heidegger (who was the first to subtract it from knowledge), the mathematicians (who broke with the object at the end of the last century, just as they broke with adequation), and the modern theories of the subject (which displace truth from its subject pronunciation).”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Introduction
Being and Event (1988)

Truth, Departure, Knowledge

“He said "cool" like I say a Spanish word when I'm not sure of the pronunciation.”

Kelley Armstrong book The Summoning

Source: The Summoning

“The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning-plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems. I use the term morphosyllabic in two senses. The first applies to the Chinese characters taken as individual units. Individual characters are morphosyllabic in the sense that they represent at once a single syllable and a single morpheme (except for the 11 percent or so of meaningless characters that represent sound only). In this usage the term is intended to replace the more widely used expressions logographic, word-syllabic, and morphemic, all of which are applied to individual characters taken as a unit. The second sense of the term refers to the structure of Chinese characters and is intended to draw attention to the fact that, in most cases, a character is composed of two elements, a phonetic grapheme which suggests the syllabic pronunciation of the full character, and a semantic element which hints at its meaning.”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989, pp. 115-116) http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html <br class="br">Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989)

Sense, Drawing

“In English we have noticed twenty-five consonant and about twenty vowel phonemes. Although individual pronunciations may differ, the phonemic habits of the same group or class will be similar. They will make similar use of heterophony. Words not phonetically separated — that is, homophones — may be separated by function or by experiential context”

John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) English linguist

Source: Speech, 1930, p. 182

“Prior to the rebellion the great mass of the people were satisfied to remain near the scenes of their birth. In fact an immense majority of the whole people did not feel secure against coming to want should they move among entire strangers. So much was the country divided into small communities that localized idioms had grown up, so that you could almost tell what section a person was from by hearing him speak… This is all changed now. The war begot a spirit of independence and enterprise. The feeling now is, that a youth must cut loose from his old surroundings to enable him to get up in the world. There is now such a commingling of the people that particular idioms and pronunciation are no longer localized to any great extent; the country has filled up "from the centre all around to the sea"; railroads connect the two oceans and all parts of the interior; maps, nearly perfect, of every part of the country are now furnished the student of geography.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

War, People, Youth, World

“Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

“My cousin fancies you are an idiot. There you experience the consequence of scorning "book larning," as you would say. Have you noticed, Catherine, his frightful Yorkshire pronunciation?”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Linton Heathcliff to Hareton Earnshaw (Ch. XXI).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Books

“Demosthenes overcame and rendered more distinct his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation by speaking with pebbles in his mouth.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Demosthenes
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“A dictionary is a reference book that lists the words of one or more languages, usually in alphabetical order, along with information about their spelling, pronunciation, grammatical status, meaning, history, and use.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 108

Books, History

“I first listen to someone who speaks the language and who reads the lyrics to me. I pay great attention to pronunciation. Once I hear the words spoken, I write the song lines phonetically in Hindi and then sing. By the grace of god, my songs in other languages – including Bengali – have been appreciated. People say they are good and the words have been correctly pronounced.”

Lata Mangeshkar (1929) Indian singer

Above two quotes about her singing in Urdu and other languages in Lata Mangeshkar has to thank Dilip Kumar for her Urdu skills!, 29 Npvember 2013, India Today http://www.deccanherald.com/content/10118/,

God, People, Singing, Reading

“All in all, the language of the Macedones was a distinct and particular form of Greek, resistant to outside influnces and conservative in pronunciation. It remained so until the fourth century when it was almost totally submerged by the flood tide of standardized Greek.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"A History of Macedonia" Vol ii, 550-336 BC

“The first and biggest difference between the two dialects is, in our opinion, is the difference in pronunciation or the stress. The Macedonian dialect usually prefers to place the stress in the beginning of the words, and the other one in the end, so in the first dialect you can’t find a word with a stress on the last syllable, while in the latter in most cases the stress is on the last syllable. Here Macedonian dialect is approaching the Serbian dialect.”

Parteniy Zografski (1818–1876) Bulgarian bishop

Thoughts about the Bulgarian language (1858)

“Never before had I heard such melody from human throat. It was superhuman. Was he a Gandharva come to earth? No expression on his face. Not much movement of lips. Perfect control over breath. Perfect pauses. Clear pronunciation. I was spellbound.”

K. L. Saigal (1904–1947) Indian actor

By Raychand Boral in "Begum Akhtar the Undisputed Malika of Ghazals".

Perfection