Aalewis
- Greatest Quote of All Time
I'm just an atheist teenager who greatly values his intelligence and scientific fact over any silly fiction book written 3,500 years ago. This being said, I am open to any and all criticism. "In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence." - Aalewis.
Melvyn Bragg
- Excerpt: "The Common Tongue" / The Adventure of English
It would take two to three hundred years for English to become more than first among equals. From the beginning English was battle-hardened in strategies of survival and takeover. After the first tribes arrived it was not certain which dialect if any would become dominant... There had been luck, but also cunning and the beginnings of what was to become English's most subtle and ruthless characteristic of all: its capacity of absorbing others.
Mario Pei
- Excerpt: The Saga of Proper Names / The Story of English
Baugh claims that there are in English over five hundred common nouns derived from proper ones. This is probably an understatement, when we consider the vast number of place-names, personal names and nicknames that appear today as names of objects. A few of the better known ones are macadam, derrick, hansom, shrapnel, silhouette, lynch, boycott, pasteurize, mercerize, mesmerize, fletcherize, spoonerism, pander, lilliputian, tabasco, and Charleston...
Mario Pei
- Excerpt: Change and Rate of Change / The Story of English
The English verb, like all its Germanic cognates, is distinguished by the relative poverty of simple tenses and by the general division of the verbs into weak and strong. The strong verbs, far more characteristic than the weak, feature the ablaut change in the root vowel represented by sing, sang, sung. The story of ablaut (a German term, literally meaning "away-sound") is quite fascinating.
