Larry Trask quotes

In the ninth and tenth centuries the Vikings invaded Britain from Scandinavia and settled in large numbers. Their language, which we call Old Norse, was at least partly comprehensible to the English, who did not hesitate to take over hundreds of words from it: skirt, window, scrub, sky, give, hit, kick, scatter, scrape, skill, scowl, score, fellow, want, skin, knife, law, happy, ugly, wrong and even the pronouns they and them.
-- Larry Trask

#Law #Knives #Sky

Not long time ago there was a striking example of the extent to which English has diverged: a television company put out a programme filmed in the English city of Newcastle, where the local variety of English is famously divergent and difficult, and the televised version was accompanied by English subtitles!
-- Larry Trask

#Cities #Long #Divergent

The likelihood is that any English-speaking skier has more words for different types of snow than any inhabitant of Alaska or Greenland.
-- Larry Trask

#Alaska #Snow #Different

I recall that, the first time I met a Geordie speaker, it was some days before I could understand a single word he was saying.
-- Larry Trask

#Firsts #Mets #First Time

The grammar of a language is simply the way it combines smaller elements (such as words) into larger elements (such as sentences).
-- Larry Trask

#Elements #Way #Language

Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America's most privileged version of the level field.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

Our constitution, in short, is a judge-made constitution, and it bears on its face all the features, good and bad, of judge-made law.

How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

A knife can be a symbol, but it also better be able to cut string. And if it represent cutting free, cutting loose, in the story’s beginning, it better not be used to prop up a bookcase and then forgotten later on.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

When the spirit shines, even foggy skies make pleasant light.

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

Lustre of man walking proud beneath the sky diminishes to nothing and goes unregarded.

If you want your energy bills to go up, you should support an ever greater dependence on foreign oil, because the rate of new discoveries is declining as demand in China and India is growing, and the price of oil and thus the price of coal will go sky high.