"We literally live inside of linguistics. We create the world through words."
"We use some parts of the brain very similarly for bilingualism, but what it's doing with the signals can be very, very different."
"There's an incredible three-dimensional structure to the way the argument's being presented...It's not possible for a human being to do linguistically."
"Noam Chomsky has made two international reputations in unrelated or apparently unrelated fields: the widest is as one of the national leaders of American resistance to the Vietnam War; the deepest is as a professor of linguistics who, before he was 40 years old, had transformed the nature of his subject."
"Undeciphered languages: All around the world, there are dozens of inscriptions on everything from clay tablets to old boulders."
"By 40, he revolutionized linguistics and is widely recognized as the most important linguist to have ever lived."
"The words Bhava and Pada...Bhava means meaning, and Pada means word. There is a link between the meaning and word - word is tangible, external, whereas meaning is internal, intangible."
"Language has the opportunity, and the way you arrange it, because it's mathematics, it is the code of the universe."
"It's very important to understand that language is not an ideal and maybe even a deficient tool in terms of describing our emotions and our states of mind and body."
"He was also a wordsmith who would play on words and tell you about the origin of words."
"Linguistics is not about translation and it's not about learning how to speak languages. It's about analyzing language as a scientific object."
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog: This sentence contains every letter in the alphabet."
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo: Once again, this is a perfectly grammatical sentence."
"Pirahã is one of the most interesting languages of all time, spoken by an indigenous group of about 700 people living in the Brazilian jungle."
"Your subconscious understands complex grammar rules intuitively, organizing thoughts in real time without conscious effort."
"Semanticity-- the notion that there is an endless array, an infinite array, of sounds that could be generated by voices."
"All languages show recursion, which is a really important property."
"Every single language has the ability to talk about language."
"In order to find out what a word means, you don't look up the definition; you look up the etymology."
"The most beautiful Hebrew word in the whole vocabulary talks about God's 'hesed' - loving-kindness, steadfast love, grace, mercy, faithfulness, goodness, devotion, generous, patient loyal love."
"The meaning of any word is infinitely expansive."
"Language is messy and often difficult to categorize."
"Orthography is the way a language is written."
"Phonology is the categorization of sounds used in languages."
"The Phoenicians created a model alphabet that is considered the ancestor of all modern ones."
"Real vowels are in the middle of acronyms. It's just basic linguistics. Read Chomsky."
"Creoles are languages where two languages meet, and their children speak a Creole, a full language that is composed of the two but is neither of them."
"You can actually predict the form of words in English from the form they have in Sanskrit thousands of miles and thousands of years away."
"This story originated the Chinese word for contradiction 'maodun', literally translated spear shield."
"I'm really weirdly interested in etymology and linguistics, like where words come from and how language forms."
"The word rune actually means whisper, secret, mystery."
"Accents are simply regional variations in how people pronounce different words, which contributes to audibly different rhythms of speaking."
"Gentleness can also be translated as meekness."
"Bern and Berlin both come from Germanic roots meaning marshy place."
"We lose ideas that are specific to cultures when a language dies. We lose records of time periods and people. We lose stories that were important to them at that time and could still have meaning in our lives today."
"Language is inherently a means for one group to dominate another."
"Language is interesting because... Language is not, so it's not the same thing, like when languages move, it's not necessarily because people have moved."
"The Picts may have spoken an earlier form of language before it was influenced by Goidelic language-speaking Celtic people of Ireland."
"Language has a history and a memory, and language changes and evolves."
"While the Simpsons is known for popularizing phrases like 'don't have a cow man' and 'd'oh,' many sources report another word made popular by the series: 'meh.'"
"Finnish language belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group."
"Your language influences the way you think about the world."
"Not every language or culture has the same color terms."
"It's important to break down language. I think language is so nuanced."
"After the creation of this rule Kaku refers to the rule itself as insurance which makes sense but it's also an interesting choice of words."
"Language embodies and instills a powerful multi-layered cultural orientation and impetus, and even to some degree an ideology."
"We as humans have created many different languages... a legitimate human superpower."
"Every translation, however faithful, however good, is already an interpretation."
"the English language itself which has become a universal language around the globe"
"You just cannot be raised for the first six to seven years in an English-speaking home and later on not be able to speak English without an accent."
"Once you have a name for something, you get power over it."
"The schwa is the lazier sound and it shows up everywhere in English."
"Stress can actually change the meaning of a sentence."
"Compound nouns can be single, hyphenated, or separate words."
"Compound nouns are made up of two different words."
"Foreigners develop their words for China from 'Tinh.'"
"Words convey meaning. Words are little mouth sounds we make that transmit things from our brains to the brains of others."
"Singular they is a great example of a place where we should look back at history to understand the current moment."
"The integrity of biblical history ultimately is justified by the expression of these languages."
"There are facts out there in the world, but definitions are categorically linguistic. We create them."
"French has a very sing-songy type of inflection when it's spoken through um same as Italian and Spanish they tend to have a natural melodic to it."
"He thrived as a linguist but wasn't a big fan of all the marching and weapons training."
"It was just really cool to hear, especially some of the older languages or dead languages."
"Gratitude is a great word, it's nice, it's fluffy, a solid 11 points in Scrabble."
"Egyptian hieroglyphics are the parent of the Phoenician script, Greek script, and more."
"Words are completely neutral. It's the context that counts."
"The language of the Celts, their most important legacy."
"So we see French loanwords in English like gentle, following our hard-G soft-G rule that we’re taught in elementary school."
"He's a real sharpie... genius... knows a lot of languages."
"If words don't actually mean anything like do and you then we don't have a language and there's no point in talking."
"Human languages are complex and nuanced. What we don't know is if the same is true of any other animal."
"Any study of linguistics or history is going to be incomplete unless you take into account the cultural context that it's set within."
"Language is a really interesting thing, it's a very powerful mechanism by which and through which we communicate with other people."
"Your video sparked a new interest in linguistics for me."
"Novial’s grammar is, surprise surprise, designed to be simpler and more regular than most natural languages."
"English isn't a prescriptive language. You can tell people to speak English however you like, but if they don't speak it that way, they're not speaking it wrong."
"The Minoans were unbelievably sophisticated, believed to have been the first Europeans to make their own written language."
"The ancient Maya civilization was one of the great civilizations of the western hemisphere and the only one with a fully developed written language."
"When you arrange those words in a certain way, meaning emerges."
"Words convey meaning, and people will misunderstand if you miscommunicate."
"English language has been a more homogenized language."
"Words are just tools to communicate the underlying ideas."
"The widespread embrace of the word 'content' actually means something."
"Over 1,000 artificial languages have been created since the 17th century."
"The two most powerful words in the English language: I am."
"Javanese has 6 vowels, a e i o u and ə, with /a/ being pronounced [ɔ] at the end of words or before another [ɔ]."
"You can't just assume that you know automatically what ancient words refer to, there has to be an effort to understand the ancient language."
"Language looks the way it does because our brains are uniquely equipped for a very specific kind of language."
"The burial provides the first solid evidence of the Greek language being used alongside Latin."
"It must mean something to be a word, and it must be a shared meaning. If either two of these rules are not followed, you don't have a language."
"Another French one... that person is speaking a second language..."
"Languages are made up of more or less stable patterns which I knew all too well, taking weekly Latin exams, and such patterns can't be just easily made up on the fly."
"They recognize it as an inflection. Mutual intelligibility, they just know."
"Language changes work that way, it's been basically one generation at a time."
"In English, the word is peace, in English, the word is also completeness, in English, the word is also hello and goodbye, the Hebrew is shalom shalom shalom."
"The Quran has linguistic, numeric, and scientific miracles."
"Names are not meant to be objective. Titles are meant to be objective."
"Russian Cyrillic script got its name from the Byzantine missionary Saint Cyril."
"I think the beautiful part is simplicity... In half a page you can define the whole language."
"Take a Latin, because if you know Latin, an inflected language, so my Greek teacher said then you can understand Greek."
"It's a lovely example of how languages don't just give you sounds and ways to communicate, it's a whole new way of thinking."
"The United States doesn't have an official language."
"C is a lovely letter! Both aesthetically and functionally, I’m a big fan."
"What is a formant and how does it change your voice so much?"
"He learned an entire language in two weeks. Now, that's dedication!"
"I've calculated his translations are 20 to 30 accurate."
"Now the wheels are interesting in Hebrew the word is ophanim."
"The worldbuilding on display in Kēlen’s vocabulary is very impressive."
"Kēlen is a wonderful conlang that I’m glad I had the chance to take an in-depth look at."
"Compound words are when two or more words are put together to form a new word with the new meaning."
"Newsflash social justice warriors: the whole planet does not revolve around your use of language."
"The key to solving so many of the questions we face is a deeper understanding of language and its development."
"Just like the gender of the noun impacts exactly how we say 'the' and similar words."
"The hebrew word for light means the same thing as knowledge."
"Dialect boundaries don't necessarily follow political boundaries."
"Accents often don't follow political boundaries. They follow settlement patterns and contact historically isolated communities."
"Language families are a tremendous place to start in understanding ancient peoples."
"Teach you guys the basics of pitch accent in less than an hour and you would understand it. It's the basics are not very complicated."
"Greek is really ancient, even older than Latin and Chinese."
"In a pluralistic society, everyone can find something."
"Language reshapes and reorganizes our reality."
"Learning Chinese characters is like building blocks, starting with the most frequent and useful ones."
"I think swamp lytics actually is an actual thing now, it's an actual word because the definition of word which I'm gonna make up on the spot is something you know, it's a way that you can describe something."
"In fact, the Oxford Dictionary declared 'toxic' as 2018's word of the year."
"State names come from a variety of languages."
"The creator invented language, you don't give a name to the one that invented language itself."
"No one letter is good or bad; they all come together to make something bigger than themselves. An alphabet united can quickly become untied, and real fun so easily turns into funeral."
"Words have legal meanings and those legal meanings are important."
"A person's name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language."
"Some words are just objectively fun to say like salubrious or titular."
"God, the word God is a man-made word, that is a man-made term."
"It's interesting that Russian is the only language to change this part even though the other languages have their own variant of Mr. or at least something close."
"The Rosetta Stone became a valuable key to deciphering many ancient Egyptian mysteries."
"Heroglyphs in ancient Greece were ancient characters used to represent either a sound, a word, or just a syllable."
"The Rosetta Stone: decoding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, a pivotal moment in deciphering history."
"Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States."
"Flesh is one of those words that's on my Hit List."
"Ilothwii, the oldest of all tongues, still clings to existence, unchanged even after untold millennia."
"Within the context of its fictional world, Ilothwii’s genetic relationships to other languages remain unclear."
"Ilothwii’s phonology is unusual to say the least."
"You don't learn a language, you acquire it in a natural way."
"The language is malleable in the sense that we can actually introduce new words into the language."
"I'm glad to be living with the English of right now, surrounded by all the new words."
"One knows how to do conversation, one knows how to interact verbally, and out of this interaction syntactic structures are developed."
"There's no simple measure of how different languages are from one another."
"The key thing to realize is what it's really telling us is a science fact; there's more regularity in human language than we thought there was."
"Logic is taking forms of language and saying these are patterns that are repeated possible patterns in these pieces of language that are meaningful sequences."
"There are these sort of semantic laws of motion that describe how you move through the space of meanings as you add words into a piece of text."
"Their civilization is so complex, their language is so complex, their hieroglyphs are so complex."
"From a purely linguistic point of view, the question of whether Scots is a dialect of English or a language in its own right is meaningless."
"Years of failed attempts by cryptographers left the resistant cipher unsolved until the combination of linguists and computer scientists' efforts."
"Chomsky argued that this could not possibly explain how virtually all human beings... master the faculty of language."
"Chomsky is an intellectual heavyweight."
"When we study human language, we're approaching what some might call the essence of humanity, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to humankind."
"I'm obsessed with Portuguese. It's like French and Spanish had a baby."
"I grew up in a messy house of languages."
"The birth of a word, you know, what could be more exciting?"
"This is exactly why corpus linguistics has to be done not only quantitatively but qualitatively."
"We're going to watch that, look at that, where did 'hippie' become really popular? The 1960s, right? No surprise there."
"One of the foremost thinkers of this Century, he revolutionized the study of language and of the human mind."
"The Chomskian revolution placed language study in a psychobiological setting and played a critical role in fueling the modern reemergence of the cognitive sciences."
"The question 'What is language?' matters very greatly to anyone concerned with understanding our modern selves, Homo sapiens."
"Language is not sound with meaning but meaning occasionally with sound."
"If language is optimally designed, it's going to provide structures that are appropriate for semantic interpretation."
"All Germanic languages have a common ancestor."
"Sometimes I'm like, you know, I read something about pitch accent and I was like oh in this one there's this one pattern where it does this."
"Language is about conveying meaning."
"Language is sufficiently interesting that, unlike most other things I'll talk about in this class, there is an entire field devoted to its study."
"Language allows us to produce a virtual infinity of sentences."
"The world of linguistics... can be a fascinating subject that teaches us not only about languages used in other parts of the world but also the traditions that go along with them."
"Fajita means little belts and comes from a northern Mexican slang word."
"How do you make a language from scratch like that? It's so sick."
"Corpus linguistics involves the study of large databases of language known as corpora."
"Language is simply a transfer of information."
"Dr. Chomsky's work in Universal grammar and transformation grammar revolutionized the field of linguistics and opened the flood gate for new thoughts on language and cognition."
"The modern field developed within the framework of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s."
"Its roots lie in classical India and Greece 2500 years ago."
"It's not that chemistry was reduced to physics."
"The Faculty of language is somehow identifying linguistic experience as a separate category of phenomena."
"The most important part of the ancient languages is the center point."
"Proto-Germanic *uns, which without the change, became Dutch ons, and with it, became Swedish oss and English us."
"English forms questions with the verb 'do', and this is extremely rare cross-linguistically."
"Swedish has pitch accent, where a certain pitch pattern is applied to the span of a word."
"Real quick to wrap up all the North Germanic languages, let’s talk about their common ancestor: Old Norse."
"But there’s a reason Chomsky’s work revolutionized linguistics. And computer science. Which actually plays a huge role here."
"I don't really see a reason to postulate much innate structure."
The origins of the word "Canaan" are a mystery.
"Swahili is a mostly Bantu-based hybrid language."
"Many of the most common words in English are words that are unstressed or reduced."
"Based on this, it's highly likely that Jesus spoke at least two languages, maybe even a third."
"The next type of linking is assimilation and this is when two sounds come together to create a new sound."
"In a sentence, you're looking at the strong form versus the weak form of a word."
"We use vectors to represent words."
"Language can be investigated as a mental construct which tends to focus on the syntagmatic or as a social construct which tends to focus on the paradigmatic."
"Philosophy as a foundational analysis of linguistic meanings prior to scientific study is rendered not only impossible but laughable."
"One of the puzzles to really mystify researchers is Rongorongo, a system of glyphs whose meaning is now lost to time and is yet to be deciphered."
"Nobody would say nowadays anything goes in a language, so you wouldn't have a color system in a language that has 12 words for shades of red and one word for every other color."
"Cognitive linguistics: explaining how language knowledge emerges from language use."
"Language structures and forms tell us about the human mind."