Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make… - John Rupert Firth

" "
Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make it fit our common lives. We are not born to follow words. Words follow life. It has always been so from the very beginning. In fact, the human larynx and the shape of the passages above it have evolved in harmony with the lives our earliest ancestors lived, first in the trees, and then on the ground.

John Rupert Firth

Sources available for members. Sign up free to see where this quote comes from

English

Collect this quote

About John Rupert Firth

(June 17, 1890 in Keighley, Yorkshire – December 14, 1960 in Lindfield, West Sussex), commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist and a leading figure in British linguistics during the 1950s.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: J. R. Firth

All quotes from John Rupert Firth Similar Quotes by other Originators

Originators like John Rupert Firth:

Michael Halliday Michel Bréal Ferdinand de Saussure Benjamin Lee Whorf John Langshaw Austin

Additional quotes by John Rupert Firth

A western scholar must de-europeanize himself, and, in view of the most universal use of English, an Englishman must de-Anglicize himself as well.

Meaning... is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, grammar, lexicography, and semantics each handles its own components of the complex in its appropriate context.

Research into the detailed contextual distribution of sociologically important words, what one might call focal or pivotal words, is only just beginning.

Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make it fit our common lives. We are not born to follow words. Words follow life. It has alway… - John Rupert Firth

About John Rupert Firth

Also Known As

Additional quotes by John Rupert Firth