Arika Okrent Quotes & Sayings

When one heated exchange (in English) led a commenter to write "Go fuck yourself!" in Lojban, it turned into a lengthy discussion of why he hadn't said what he meant to say, and what the proper Lojban expression for the sentiment might be. — Arika Okrent

What kind of a world do we live in that has room for dog yoga but not for Esperanto? — Arika Okrent

Before you judge me as some kind of 'anything goes' language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it. — Arika Okrent

How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken
light-bulb?" goes the old Lojban joke. "Two: one to decide
what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb
emits broken light. — Arika Okrent

At one stage in the history of English, the past tenses of verbs were marked by a regular vowel change process; instead of "help/helped," we had "help/holp." Over time, -ed became the preferred way to mark the past tense, and eventually the past tense of most verbs was formed by adding -ed. But the old pattern was preserved in verbs like "eat/ate," "give/gave," "take/ took," "get/got" - verbs that are used very often, and so are more entrenched as a linguistic habit (the very frequently used "was/ were" is a holdover from an even older pattern). They became irregular because the world changed around them. — Arika Okrent

The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind. — Arika Okrent

The variety of shape, pattern, and color found in the languages of the world is a testament to the wonder of nature, to the breathtaking array of possibilities that can emerge, tangled and wild, from the fertile human endowments of brain and larynx, intelligence and social skills. — Arika Okrent