94 Quotes by David Crystal

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.

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.

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.

The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It.

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.

Academics don’t normally manage to alter people’s way of thinking through their strength of argument.

It took three years to put Shakespeare’s words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.

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.

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.