I am most familiar with the Gujarati language.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

I went by myself to Hollywood, I spoke no English, every day I had to go to school.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

‚Good English‘ is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like ‚and‘ that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

I don’t speak Spanish, I speak a little of Italian but no Spanish.

Syllables govern the world.

‚I am‘ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‚I do‘ is the longest sentence?

I think I should learn French and be a better cook – basic, really good life stuff.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I’m delighted.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‚Blah, blah, blah.‘ That’s when I get crazy.

How do I speak Spanish? Not too well.

I have learned to interface – what I think would be the contemporary term – with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I’ve learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.

Language is the dress of thought.

It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what’s left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

Sometimes I don’t use the words ‚will‘ and ‚want‘ in the right way. The German word ‚will‘ is the English word ‚want,‘ so that’s a little bit of the problem.

All the kids are learning different languages. I asked them what languages they wanted to learn, and Shi is learning Khmai, which is a Cambodian language; Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Mad has taken to German and Russian, Z is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.