Linguists Quotes

“John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's.”
― David Craig

“For some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard as it was on priests.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“So is language change progress or degeneration? It is neither, of course. To assert that language change is for the better or worse requires some measure of what "good" or "bad" language is, and the issue of language change needn't come into question here. But no coherent criterion has ever been given: upon examination, the pronouncements of the self-appointed pundits are always a mix of cultural biases, half-understandings of languages, and an obvious compulsion for telling people what to do.”
― Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World

“We lack the analogies’ was itself somehow deficient as a diagnosis, linguists burning up during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere after encountering Area X.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance