Quotes from Nicholas Ostler

Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.

A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations.

The language history of the world shows more of the true impacts of past movements and changes of people, beyond the heraldic claims of their largely self-appointed leaders. They reveal a subtle interweave of cultural relations with power politics and economic expediency.

Latin could make no headway with the sophisticates of the eastern Mediterranean, who spoke Greek and Aramaic, but it was quickly embraced by the illiterate peoples of Gaul and Spain.

Achaeans largely took over the south-eastern coast of Italy. This country is popularly supposed to have been given its name by the Greeks: Italia would be the land of (w)italoí, 'yearling cattle', a dialectal variant of etaloí, later borrowed in fact into Latin as vituli, and still with us in the word veal.

Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai;

As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.

In fact, in the Rig Veda there is one hymn that is an invocation of V?c, speech itself. Here are two of its verses:

Celts appear to have been literate only where they had neighbours who could teach them.

over half the languages in the world, for example, have fewer than five thousand speakers, and over a thousand languages have under a dozen.

ahmo zan nikocitlewa, ahmo zan nikkocitta, amo zan niktemiki, ka ye onimitznottili, mistzinko onitlacis, 'I am not dreaming, not fantasising; for I have seen you, I have looked upon you.

From the language point of view, the present population of the world is not six billion, but something over six thousand.

Languages make possible both the living of a common history, and also the telling of it.

Languages change, as they pass from the lips of one generation to the next, but there is nothing about this process of transmission which makes for decay or extinction. Like life itself, each new generation can receive the gift of its language afresh. And so it is that languages, unlike any of the people who speak them, need never grow infirm, or die. Every language has a chance of immortality, but this is not to say that it will survive for ever.

Akkadian, the language spoken by Sargon I, the first Assyrian king in 2300 BC, is a close relative of the Arabic spoken by his successor in this same land, Saddam Hussein, in AD 2000; another close relative, the Middle East's old lingua franca, Aramaic, bridges the gap between the decline of Akkadian around 600 BC and the onset of Arabic with the Muslims around AD 600. They are all sister languages within the very close Semitic family.

The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than of the merchant.

Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous. Confucius, LúnyÅ­ (Analects), ii. 15

for all we know the origin may have been due to a genius like that of Sequoya, the illiterate Cherokee who in the nineteenth century AD took the fact of English literacy as a proof of concept, and proceeded then to develop a syllabary for his own language from first principles.

Recall is an act of disciplined reimagination, and the remote past may be beyond anyone's ken.

A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people's view of the world must also be changing.

Bracelets do not embellish man, nor necklaces bright as the moon; bathing, cosmetics, garland, head-dress, none can add a whit. Man's one true embellishment is language kept perfected: finery must perish, but eternal the refinement of fine language. Bharthari, ii.17–20

with the exception of Chinese, even the languages that originated writing, and so made the earliest use of it, have dropped their original system, and borrowed another

thos anthrp?i daím?n Character for man is fate. Heraclitus