If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.

Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.

Man can be defined, if one wishes, as a languag-ized mammal.

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.

Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they come from.

Jazz was formerly a crude term for indulging in an action which in polite society is referred to, if at all, only with such vague Latin terms as intercourse and cohabitation.