Language and grammar quotes:

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Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries. -- Gilbert Murray
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such. -- Ferdinand de Saussure
The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on - these things obviously evolved. -- Daniel Tammet
It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar. -- Fred Frith
It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar. -- Noam Chomsky
In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics. -- Ferdinand de Saussure
It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a word in place of a word and when I discovered how difficult the grammar was and learning that was very discouraging for me. -- Bo Derek
Grammar is the analysis of language. -- Edgar Allan Poe
Mathematics is as little a science as grammar is a language. -- Ernst Mayr
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar. -- Ferdinand de Saussure
If Language is a Flower then without Grammar it will not smell. -- Purushottam Muley
The grammar of a language is simply the way it combines smaller elements (such as words) into larger elements (such as sentences). -- Larry Trask
Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story. -- Darren Aronofsky
The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax -- Thomas Paine
I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them. -- Red Smith
If grammar is medicine, then Roy Clark gives us the spoonful of sugar to help it go down. A wonderful tour through the labyrinth of language. -- Anne Hull
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings -- Octavio Paz
Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented. -- Charlton Laird
Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well made sentence and it should only express one idea at a time, -- Charles James
I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language. -- David Ogilvy
All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. -- James Joyce
My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well. -- Anthony Bourdain

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