Quotes About Language

Moreover, in order to show forth her wisdom and the excellence of her mind to the centuries to come, she [Nicostrata/Carmentis] worked and studied so hard that she invented her own letters, which were completely different from those of other nations, that is, she established the Latin alphabet and syntax, spelling, the difference between the vowels and consonants, as well as a complete introduction to the science of grammar.

Gjuha është një putanë, me të cilën kushdo mund të abuzojë si të ketë dëshirë.

Një nga paragjykimet, që kultivojnë burrat për ne, është se ne vdesim për shampanjë. Sikur zona, ku gudulisemi më shumë të ishte gjuha.

The Post articles consistently referred to me as "he," "Jorgensen," or "the Bronx man," as though I were some anthropological missing link.

The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well.

When you talk, your face has more moves than Lebron James.

In the meantime, the works of Gordon, Lupyan, and others suggests that words are not just convenient labels for things; rather, they are extremely powerful mental devices.

Language has to be partly innate, simply because human babies are born with the ability to learn the language of their parents. While this can justifiably be called a language instinct, there is no one gene compelling us to produce language. Instead, a set of genetic settings gives rise to a set of behaviors and perceptual and cognitive biases, some of which may be more general and others of which are more language specific.

Language is unique in that there are no other animals with which we converse, no matter what language we are speaking. And yet the miracle of this research has been the realization that what is unique from one perspective may be constructed of mostly old parts from another.

The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.

Indeed, humans won't speak or produce language unless they are taught to do so, which means that our remarkable capacity doesn't amount to much at all if someone isn't there to provide a model for how to use it.

Developmental psychologists now talk about the cross-modality of language, meaning that language is expressed in various ways. Instead of the image of a brain issuing language to a mouth, from which it emerges as imperfect speech, think, rather, of language emerging in the child as an expression of its entire body, articulating both limbs and mouth at the same time.

While all living things affect the evolution of other living things simply by virtue of trying to stay alive, humans interact with the biological evolution of other species in a much more complex and powerful fashion because of one ability: language. Nothing occurs on the human scale without language. No language means no agriculture, no animal farming, no science.

At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.

Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten.

Language is the real information highway, the first virtual world. Language is the worldwide web, and everyone is logged on.

The world loses one of its six thousand languages every two weeks, and children have stopped learning half of the languages currently spoken in the world. It's been argued that languages are under greater threat than any endangered bird or mammal.

Whether or not it's moral to let language extinction occur, it is the case that languages are irreplaceable records of the development of human societies and alternate windows into the human mind. When a language dies, we lose the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo or the Tyrannosaurus rex.

But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose.

The same linguistic structures that allow us to soar through time and space and model entire universes in our heads also enable us to foresee our own mortality. Language also permits us to imagine a self that isn't earthbound and a world beyond death. So far it hasn't offered a way to avoid it.

Jackendoff and Lerdahl point out that large structures in music can be like dramatic arcs in narratives. The slow buildup of tension, a climax, and then denouement can be found in both musical pieces and stories. It may be that both music and language exploit a human predisposition to understand events in terms of tension and resolution.

It's small wonder that humans dream in myth and in art about other worlds, because we all have the experience of inhabiting one world and, as we are taught language, of walking through a door into another. Even physicists are obsessed with the idea of a multiverse. But we already live in one.

According to Fred Dick, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, all the laboratories that have tried to find a language area have been successful in that they have indeed found dozens, even hundreds, of them.

While few researchers would claim that language and genes are not related, there has been little evidence that language is genetically encoded.