Quotes & Sayings About Linguistic Intelligence

The Queue consists entirely of fragments of ochered' dialogue, a linguistic vernacular anchored by the long-suffering word stoyat' (to stand). You stood? Yes, stood. Three hours. Got damaged ones. Wrong size. Here's what the line wasn't: a gray inert nowhere. Imagine instead an all-Soviet public square, a hurly-burly where comrades traded gossip and insults, caught up with news left out of the newspapers, got into fistfights, or enacted comradely feats. In the thirties the NKVD had informers in queues to assess public moods, hurrying the intelligence straight to Stalin's brooding desk. Lines shaped opinions and bred ad hoc communities: citizens from all walks of life standing, united by probably the only truly collective authentic Soviet emotions: yearning and discontent (not to forget the unifying hostility toward war veterans and pregnant women, honored comrades allowed to get goods without a wait). — Anya Von Bremzen

Human spoken language seems to be
adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities. — Carl Sagan

The normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is nothing can well be more useless. Edward Sapir - 1924 — Guy Deutscher