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“Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.”
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature
“If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? I a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? A writer is someone who writes, and a stinger is something that stings. But fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, hammers don't ham, humdingers don't humding, ushers don't ush, and haberdashers do not haberdash...If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth? One goose, two geese-so one moose, two meese? If people ring a bell today and rang a bell yesterday, why don't we say that they flang a ball? If they wrote a letter, perhaps they also bote their tongue.”
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
“The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.”
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
“Peppier n. The waiter at a fancy restaurant whose sole purpose seems to be walking around asking diners if they want ground pepper.”
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
“Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, "Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English.”
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
― The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
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