People who speak the same language can hate one another as easily as can people who speak unrelated languages.

Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo.

An inability to communicate has little to do with international friction-as is seen in the special ferocity of wars fought between people who speak the same language.

The dictionary is a closed system in which someone interested in the meaning of a word can go around and around and end up exactly where he started, simply because words are defined in terms of other words, and these, in turn, are defined in terms of still other words.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

An invention or new combination can be successful only if all if the elements necessary for the recombination are present in the culture.