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21 " Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language. "
― Guy Deutscher , Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
22 " the brain of a child learning a language can cope with a mind-boggling amount of linguistic complexity. "
23 " there is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages. "
24 " Franz Delitzsch, who put it most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that “we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place. "
25 " The culturalists tried to make the idea more appealing by pointing out that even in modern languages we use idioms that are rather imprecise about color. Don’t we speak of “white wine,” for instance, even if we can see perfectly well that it is really yellowish green? Don’t we have “black cherries” that are dark red and “white cherries” that are yellowish red? Aren’t red squirrels really brown? Don’t the Italians call the yolk of an egg “red” (il rosso)? Don’t we call the color of orange juice “orange,” although it is in fact perfectly yellow? (Check it next time.) "
26 " Pek çok dilde kırmızı rengin adı "kan" kelimesinden türemiştir. İlginçtir, bu dilsel bağlantı kuşaklar boyunca Kitabı Mukaddes tefsircilerinin kafasını yormuştur, çünkü söz konusu olan insanlığın atasının adıdır. Kitabı Mukaddes etmiolojisine göre Adem adını yapıldığı adamah denen kırmızı çamurdan alır. Ama adamah kelimesi de Sami kökenli adam, yani "kırmızı" kelimesinden gelir ve bu kelimenin de kökeninde dam yani "kan kelimesi vardır. "
27 " The normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is nothing can well be more useless. Edward Sapir - 1924 "
― Guy Deutscher
28 " When one is trying to speak a foreign language without years of schooling in its grammatical nuances, there is one survival strategy that one always falls back on: strip down to the bare essentials, do away with everything but the most critical content, ignore anything that’s not crucial for getting the basic meaning across. The aborigines who try to speak English do exactly that, not because their own language has no grammar but because the sophistication of their own mother tongue is of little use when struggling with a foreign language that they have not learned properly. "
29 " Much of a language's complexity is not necessarily for effective communication. "
30 " In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. "
― Guy Deutscher , The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention
31 " The wheels of language run so smoothly that one rarely bothers to stop and think about all the resourcefulness and expertise that must have gone into making it tick. Language conceals its art. "
32 " While the pursuit of the overall complexity of language is a wild-goose chase, there is no need to give up on the notion of complexity altogether. In fact, we can considerably improve our chances of catching something meaty if we turn away from the phantom of overall complexity and instead aim for the complexity of particular areas of language. ... the more challenging question is whether the differences in the complexity of particular areas might reflect the culture of the speakers and the structure of their society. "
33 " Why does the egocentric system feel so much easier and more natural to handle? Simply because we always know where ‘in front of’ us is and where ‘behind’ and ‘left’ and ‘right’ are. We don’t need a map or a compass to work this out, we don’t need to look at the sun or the North Star, we just feel it, because the egocentric system of coordinates is based directly on our own body and our immediate visual field. "
34 " how modern Hebrew has recently coined a rather recherché template, the passive of the reflexive (‘he was made to snog himself’), "
35 " People can cope with the chaos of change over the years (that is, with 'diachronic variation'), simply because they can cope with the even greater chaos of synchronic variation, the diversity at any one point in time. "
36 " One example that can illustrate how deeply such conceptual mappings are engrained in both language and mind is the image ‘more is up, less is down’. "
37 " As earl as the seventeenth century, John Locke recognized that in the realm of abstract notions each language is allowed to carve up its own concepts -- or "specific ideas" as he called them -- in its own way. "
38 " within two to three generations at least half the world’s six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, "
39 " The mind cannot just manufacture words for abstract concepts out of thin air – all it can do is adapt what is already available. "
40 " Subordination is a syntactic process that is often touted (by syntacticians, at least) as the jewel in the crown of language, and the best example for the ingenuity of its design: the ability to subsume a whole clause within another. "