Romance Languages/linguistic Features

Famous quotes containing the words romance, languages, linguistic and/or features:

    “Harvey: Oh, you kids these days, I’m telling you. You think the only relationship a man and a woman can have is a romantic one.
    Gil: That sure is what we think. You got something better?
    Harvey: Oh, romance is very nice. A good thing for youngsters like you, but Helene and I have found something we think is more appropriate to our stage of life—companionship.
    Gil: Companionship? I’ve got a flea-bitten old hound at home who’ll give me that.”
    —Tom Waldman (d. 1985)

    “It is time for dead languages to be quiet.”
    —Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972)

    “The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
    —Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

    “It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
    —Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)