David Crystal > Quotes

“The only languages which do not change are dead ones.”
― David Crystal

“Joke exchanges are carried on in deadly earnest, like a verbal duel-mouth-to-mouth combat. Bang, bang: you’re (linguistically) dead.”
― David Crystal, Language Play

“The story of the English writing system is so intriguing, and the histories behind individual words so fascinating, that anyone who dares to treat spelling as an adventure will find the journey rewarding.”
― David Crystal, Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling

“I believe that any form of writing exercise is good for you. I also believe that any form of tuition which helps develop your awareness of the different properties, styles, and effects of writing is good for you. It helps you become a better reader, more sensitive to nuance, and a better writer, more sensitive to audience. Texting language is no different from other innovative forms of written expression that have emerged in the past. It is a type of language whose communicative strengths and weaknesses need to be appreciated.”
― David Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

“Here is a rewriting of the British national anthem, by 'Camille, Australia'. It is, she explains, chiefly for the benefit of Microsoft Word and Outlook Express users:

Gd CTRL-S r gr8sh Qun.
Long liv r nobl Qun.
Gd CTRL-S the. Qun!
ALT-S hr vktrES,
HpE & glrES,
Lng 2 rain ovR S
Gd CTRL-S th. Qun!”
― David Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

“In Old English, thou (thee, thine, etc.) was singular and you was plural. But during the thirteenth century, you started to be used as a polite form of the singular - probably because people copied the French way of talking, where vous was used in that way. English then became like French, which has tu and vous both possible for singulars; and that allowed a choice. The norm was for you to be used by inferiors to superiors - such as children to parents, or servants to masters, and thou would be used in return. But thou was also used to express special intimacy, such as when addressing God. It was also used when the lower classes talked to each other. The upper classes used you to each other, as a rule, even when they were closely related.
So, when someone changes from thou to you in a conversation, or the other way round, it conveys a different pragmatic force. It will express a change of attitude, or a new emotion or mood.”
― David Crystal

“People sometimes say: 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' That's true. But language is never far away. To talk about the picture, you may need a thousand words.”
― David Crystal, A Little Book of Language

“There is little scientific data on the point, but evidently people do speak to themselves.”
― David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language

“It’s often thought that the only function of pronunciation is to facilitate intelligibility; but it is also there to express personal or group identity.”
― David Crystal, Sounds Appealing: The Passionate Story of English Pronunciation

“Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.”
― David Crystal, Language Death

“This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.”
― David Crystal, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left

“Intonation is the use of pitch to convey meaning in a language. It has been described as the music or melody of speech.”
― David Crystal, Sounds Appealing: The Passionate Story of English Pronunciation

“Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.”
― David Crystal, How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die

“The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.”
― David Crystal, The Story of English in 100 Words

“The two billion people who speak English these days live mainly in countries where they’ve learned English as a foreign language. There are only around 400 million mother-tongue speakers – chiefly living in the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the countries of the Caribbean. This means that for every one native speaker of English there are now five non-native speakers. The centre of gravity in the use of English has shifted, therefore. Once upon a time, it would have been possible to say, in terms of number of speakers, that the British ‘owned’ English. Then it was the turn of the Americans. Today, it’s the turn of those who have learned English as a foreign language, who form the vast majority of users. Everyone who has taken the trouble to learn English can be said to ‘own’ it now, and they all have a say in its future. So, if most of them say such things as informations and advices, it seems inevitable that one day some of these usages will become part of international standard English, and influence the way people speak in the ‘home’ countries. Those with a nostalgia for linguistic days of old may not like it, but it will not be possible to stop such international trends.”
― David Crystal, Making Sense of Grammar

“Here are three elements we often see in town names:
If a town ends in “-by”, it was originally a farmstead or a small village where some of the Viking invaders settled. The first part of the name sometimes referred to the person who owned the farm - Grimsby was “Grim’s village”. Derby was “a village where deer were found”. The word “by” still means “town” in Danish.
If a town ends in “-ing”, it tells us about the people who lived there. Reading means “The people of Reada”, in other words “Reada’s family or tribe”. We don’t know who Reada was, but his name means “red one”, so he probably had red hair.
If a town ends in “-caster” or “-chester”, it was originally a Roman fort or town. The word comes from a Latin words “castra”, meaning a camp or fortification. The first part of the name is usually the name of the locality where the fort was built. So Lancaster, for example, is “the Roman fort on the River Lune”.”
― David Crystal, A Little Book of Language

“The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It”
― David Crystal, Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar

“Of all the Latin words that came into Old English, only a hundred or so remain in modern Standard English.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Faced with the sentence therapistsneedspecialtreatment we need to know if this is a text about sex crimes or about speech pathology before we can correctly read it aloud.”
― David Crystal, Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation

“Mixed accents are the norm these days. Even if you don’t travel, you’re not immune from accent shift. Innumerable voices enter your home every day through radio, television, the telephone, and the internet.”
― David Crystal, Sounds Appealing: The Passionate Story of English Pronunciation

“We'll never get them to notice us if we say ordinary things in an ordinary way.”
― David Crystal, A Little Book of Language

“we now know that Hengist and Horsa were by no means the first Germanics to arrive in Britain from the European Continent.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“The spelling England emerged in the fourteenth century, and soon after became established as the norm.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Synaloepha? A Latin term for the coalescence of two syllables into one (as when you are becomes y’are).”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“When Alfred began his revival, this was the first time (apart from in a few legal documents) that English had been used for prose exposition, and certainly there are no surviving precedents for prose writings of any length.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Information is always being left out, therefore, when speech is written down. And conversely, information is always being added when a written text is spoken aloud.”
― David Crystal, Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation

“the names of the four Old English dialects recognized in philological tradition: West Saxon, Kentish, Mercian, and Northumbrian, with the last two sometimes grouped together as a northern variety, Anglian.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Modern poetry, too, uses words (usually archaisms) that are rarely or never found in prose – such as morn ‘morning’, ere ‘before’, and oft ‘often’.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“When the invaders arrived in England, they did not bring with them three ‘pure’ Germanic dialects – Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish – but a wide range of spoken varieties, displaying different kinds of mutual influence.”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English

“Byrhtferth, master of Ramsey school in the early eleventh century, employed a style which made copious use of learne`d words in both Old English and Latin, as in this observation on writing from his Manual of ecclesiastical computation, composed in 1011:”
― David Crystal, The Stories of English