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LINGUISTS
[ Also see Conversation Education Language Learning Speech Words ]

Besides 'tis known he could speak Greek
  As naturally as pigs squeak;
    That Latin was no more difficile
      That to a blackbird 'tis to whistle.
      - Samuel Butler (1), Hudibras
         (pt. I, canto I, l. 51)

A Babylonish dialect
  Which learned pedants much affect.
      - Samuel Butler (1), Hudibras
         (pt. I, canto I, l. 93)

For though to smatter ends of Greek
  Or Latin be the rhetoric
    Of pedants counted, and vain-glorious,
      To smatter French is meritorious.
      - Samuel Butler (1),
        Remains in Verse and Prose--Satire--Upon Our Ridiculous Imitation of the French
         (line 127),
        a Greek proverb condemns the man of two tongues

I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
  Which melts like kisses from a female mouth.
      - Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron),
        Beppo (st. 44)

. . . Philologists, who chase
  A painting syllable through time and space
    Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
      To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.
      - William Cowper, Retirement (l. 691)

He Greek and Latin speaks with greater ease
  Than hogs eat acorns, and tame pigeons peas.
      - Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex,
        Panegyric on Tom Coriate

Lashed into Latin by the tingling rod.
      - John Gay

Lash'd into Latin by the tingling rod.
      - John Gay, The Birth of the Squire (l. 46)

He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.
  [Ger., Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.]
      - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
        Kunst und Alterthum

Small Latin, and less Greek.
      - Ben Jonson, To the Memory of Shakespeare

Everything is Greek, when it is more shameful to be ignorant of Latin.
  [Lat., Omnia Graece!
    Cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine.]
      - Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenal), Satires
         (VI, 187),
        (second line said to be spurious)

Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.
      - Jean de la Bruyere,
        The Characters or Manners of the Present Age
         (ch. XII)

It is Hebrew to me.
  [Fr., C'est de l'hebreu pour moi.]
      - Moliere (pseudonym of Jean Baptiste Poquelin),
        L'Etourdi (act III, sc. 3)

He attempts to use language which he does not know.
  [Lat., Negatas artifex sequi voces.]
      - Persius (Aulus Persius Flaccus),
        Satires--Prologue (XI)

Speaks three or four languages word for word without a book.
      - William Shakespeare

This is your devoted friend, sir, the manifold linguist and the armipotent soldier.
      - William Shakespeare,
        All's Well That Ends Well
         (Second Lord at IV, iii)

But those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but for mine own part, if was Greek to me.
      - William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
         (Casca at I, ii)

Away with him, away with him! He speaks Latin.
      - William Shakespeare,
        King Henry the Sixth, Part II
         (Cade at IV, vii)

O, good my lord, no Latin!
  I am not such a truant since my coming
    As not to know the language I have lived in.
      A strnage tongue makes my cause more strnage, suspicious.
        Pray speak in English.
      - William Shakespeare,
        The Life of King Henry the Eighth
         (Katherine at III, i)

But to the purpose--for we cite our faults
  That they may hold excused our lawless lives;
    And partly, seeing you are beautified
      With goodly shape, and by your own report
        A linguist, and a man of such perfection
          As we do in our quality much want--
      - William Shakespeare,
        The Two Gentlemen of Verona
         (First Outlaw at IV, i)

He plays o' th' viol-de-gamboys, and speaks three or four languages word for word without book, and hath all the good gifts of nature.
      - William Shakespeare,
        Twelfth Night, or, What You Will
         (Toby at I, iii)

Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!
      - Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic
         (act I, sc. 2)


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