62 John McWhorter Quotes on English language, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and African american - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous John McWhorter quotes. There are more than 62 quotes in our John McWhorter quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning John McWhorter wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like English language, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and African american

that anything I write or say in this language can be said in about six thousand other ways, with completely different words

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

This was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with foreign languages.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

the eight main “dialects” of Chinese are so vastly different that they are, under any analysis, separate languages. The

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

all languages constantly create expressive usages of words or phrases that gradually wear

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Shakespeare, as it happens, writing as the 1500s became the 1600s, wrote in a period when English was just becoming what we would recognize as “our language.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

general instability in vowels–in all languages, they tend to gradually mutate into different ones as time goes by.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

There is a vast gulf in complexity, subtlety, and flexibility between human beings and other animals in regard to language ability, and that gulf is a large part of why humans have been such a successful species of such disproportionate influence on this planet.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

However, human language is unique in its ability to communicate or convey an open-ended volume of concepts:

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

the first human beings to speak language as we know it today lived in East Africa about 150,000 years ago.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Goodbye, is strictly speaking a truncated form of “Be with you, be with you!

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Language change, to the extent that we can perceive it, appears to be decay.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Because all languages are and have always been in a state of continual transformation, anything we see in a language today is the result of change.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

More to the point, though, a language consists not only of isolated words but also sounds and sentence structures, and these are at all times changing along with the word meanings.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

If you want to learn about how humans differ, study cultures. However, if you want insight as to what makes all humans worldwide the same, beyond genetics, there are few better places to start than how language works.

The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language Quotes

English is one of several languages that evolved from an unwritten ancestor linguists call Proto-Germanic;

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

is no logical conception of “language” as “proper” speech as distinguished from “quaint,” “broken” varieties best kept down on the farm or over on the other side of the tracks.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Dialects follow naturally from the inherently nondiscrete nature of language change.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

the concept of “language” is a mere terminological convenience.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

will end up being a kind of mantra for this chapter, “dialects is all there is.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Bacteria, toads, wallabies, and orangutans do not fall on a cline of increasing closeness to God; all four are equally well suited to leading the lives they lead.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Stephen Jay Gould has told us that evolution is geared not toward progressive “fitness” but toward simply filling available ecological niches.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

the social evaluations we place on how people talk are purely artificial constructs placed on speech varieties

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

there is no such thing as human beings speaking “bad grammar.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Even Fijian, spoken on a complex of islands by just seven hundred thousand people, has more than one dialect.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Each dialect is just a different roll of the language-mutation dice.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

We saw how close dialects can be compared to “covers” of an original song. A

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

mere one percent of the words in English today are not borrowed from other languages.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

This cycle eloquently demonstrates that, in the end, dialects are all there is: the “language” part is just politics!

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Don’t tell the Scandinavians I said this, but “Swedish,” “Norwegian,” and “Danish” are all really one “language,

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Now independent, the Moldovans continue to encourage a perception of “Moldovan” as a distinct “language” from Romanian, in part because Romanians tend to dismiss their dialect as sounding uneducated.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

as Clinton taught us in 1998, any action is potentially negatable.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

most of the languages that now exist are almost certain to become extinct within this century.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

the first human language emerged roughly 150,000 years ago in East Africa.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Today’s “Dialect” Is Tomorrow’s “Language

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

Latin illa became, with some erosion of sounds into la, the definite article

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

In fact, however, the most useful analogy to keep in mind is that a language is like a lava lamp. The “lava” slowly swirls and clumps and rises and falls in its fluid in an eternal, mesmerizing flow. Although constantly changing, in no sense is the clump of lava decaying—if one piece is beginning to drip or split into strands, we can be sure that a few inches away, other pieces are joining together. At any given point, we do not see the present configuration of the lava clump as somehow “better” than the one thirty seconds ago—the joy is in the infinite variations that the clump can take while at all times remaining consistent in its expressive motility. DIFFERENT SPINS

Word On The Street: Debunking The Myth Of A Pure Standard English Quotes

Modern Our Father, who is in heaven, blessed be your name. Give us our daily bread today. All three of these languages were rich, beautiful systems. There are no dogs to be seen. Middle English, the language of Chaucer, does not give the impression of being a “bastardization” of Old English or an example of “Old English in decay.” It was simply a new English of its own, the product of the gradual transformation of Old English, a transformation barely perceptible to Old English speakers themselves but visible to us by looking at texts over time. Similarly, Modern English, the language of Jane Austen, is surely not “bad” Middle English, but a new English in its own right. In other words, the progression from Old to Middle to Modem English shows us that contrary to the impression so easy

Word On The Street: Debunking The Myth Of A Pure Standard English Quotes

Language overlaps with culture but is not subsumed by it

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

is evidence that human language is to some extent genetically coded.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

In Greenlandic Eskimo, “I should stop drinking” is Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

view the world’s six thousand languages as accumulations of endless transformations of the single African progenitor of all of them.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

If language arose approximately when sapiens did, then a combination of the fossil record and modern comparative genetic analysis can point us to language’s time of origin.

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

the grand old tendency in sound change to erode unaccented final vowels

The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language Quotes

The war on drugs is what makes thugs.

Mcwhorter Quotes Stossel Quotes

We’re all Dennis Hopper now.

Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should Quotes Like Quotes Care Quotes

(I must note that the copy editor for this book, upon reading this section, actually allowed me to use singular they throughout the book. Here’s to them in awed gratitude!)

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English Quotes

We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.

Affirmative action Quotes Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America Quotes

Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree (“Each man in their degree”).

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English Quotes

The difference between educated people and uneducated people is that educated people have been opened up to the notion that you can disagree without fighting; whereas uneducated people, in conversation, seek to always agree--everybody agrees and agrees and that's considered basic social libation.

Conversation Quotes Educated people Quotes

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.

Language Quotes Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars Quotes Linguistics Quotes

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