Quote Alphabet word association

[Beguile's Mistress]

“It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”

Henry David Thoreau

[gaggedLouise]

A ~ All


"All his examples are from Mohawk, which is the only language he really cares about."

-Memorable quote I heard during a lecture at a course in linguistics (comparative syntax!). I won't give the name of the professor but his first name begins with an A as well. The U.S. theorist he was referring to was engaging with the issue of universal grammar - finding sets of rules for construction and spontaneous understanding of clauses that would be common to all languages, and so they could be seen as inborn and programmed into our brains. Kind of odd, then, to pick nearly all your examples from a small native American language, if that's what you want to demonstrate... 

[diamonedsky]

Beginning

“When the first baby laughed for the first time,
its laugh broke into a thousand pieces,
and they all went skipping about,
and that was the beginning of fairies.” ~ J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan