Quotes About Language

Today, the questions that remain most controversial in language evolution are the following: Was there one crucial gateway to language through which only humans have passed? Is there anything in the way language is processed by the brain that is unique to language, rather than a more general form of cognition? At what points in the trajectory of language evolution has natural selection come into play? Can any elements of the language suite be clearly identified as spandrels?

It takes at least ten years for a child to learn to coordinate lips, tongue, mouth, and breath with the exacting fine motor control that adults use when they talk.

What's amazing about speech is that when you're on the receiving end, listening to the noise that comes out of people's mouths, you instantaneously hear meaningful language. Yet speech is just sound, a semicontinuous buzz that fluctuates rapidly and regularly. Frequencies rise and fall, harmonics within the frequencies change their relationships to one another, air turbulence increases and dies away. It gets loud, and then it gets quiet.

He concluded that language, specifically the act of naming something with a word, helps categorize.

As language is learned, it alters how we process information. Just as when we learn to identify a face with a name, it alters how we treat a face-it's not just a face, it's my friend Mike-so learning language results in our automatic labeling of objects, actions, sounds, and even more abstract categories like emotions. This labeling categorizes the item and links it to other instances of the category.

A child's ability to learn many words is so completely different from anything observed in other species that many researchers propose that some neural mechanism must be especially dedicated to this acquisition of linguistic knowledge.

We would never ask a hearing student to comprehend a lecture in Mandarin if he or she did not have proficiency in the language. Nevertheless, we ask this feat of deaf children everyday.

Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.

Parlabane found the word 'pro-active' enormously useful, as it immediately exposed the speaker as an irredeemable arsehole, whatever previous impression might have been given. Once upon a time, he remembered, people and companies just did things. But that ceased to be impressive enough, and for a while they 'actively' did things. Now they 'pro-actively' did things, but it was still the same bloody things that they were doing when they just plain old did things. Meaningless wank-language.

Ronald Reagan used to say that the nine scariest words in the English language were 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

I don't think you should make so many off-colour jokes about him becoming a cuckold. You're only getting away with it because he doesn't know what it means.' 'That's the beauty of the English language. One can wrap insults inside elegance, like popping anchovies into pastry.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, on her visit to Beijing back in September 1982, had encountered a similar problem: the interpreter was heard to call her 'The Quite Honourable Margaret Thatcher'. On the other hand, she took some persuading to stop using the word 'Chinamen'.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Men are strange. It's almost unexpected to find they speak English.

Millions of people around the world learned to speak English as a second or third language, or sixth, and fluently. He'd always thought they envied his country, maybe wanted to live there, but now he wondered if they just liked English-language movies and TV shows. And maybe, just maybe, they learned English because most English speakers were too lazy or arrogant to become proficient in other languages.

There is no such thing as an empty word, only one that is worn out yet remains full.

When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I'm trying to build a word ladder up to my brain.

First evidence of this is when a toddler points to things. Finger-pointing is code.

GörünüÅŸte laf olsun diye söylenmiÅŸ baz? sözler birdenbire hileli bir havaya bürünür. A??rla??p tuhaf bir ÅŸekilde h?z alarak gelecek zaman?n herhangi bir bölümünde bir yer açmak üzere, konuÅŸandan öne geçer, hedefini kesinlikle bulan bir bumerang gibi korkunç, konuÅŸana geri döner yine.

Behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined. Actually, every word has a great burden of memories, not only just of one person but of all mankind. Take a word such as bread, or war; take a word such as chair, or bed or Heaven. Behind every word is a whole world. I'm afraid that most people use words as something to throw away without sensing the burden that lies in a word.

We were told that the name Dalai Lama is not used in Tibet at all. It is a Mongolian expression meaning "Broad Ocean." Normally the Dalai Lama is referred to as the "Gyalpo Rimpoche," which means "Precious King." His parents and brothers use another title in speaking of him. They call him "Kundün," which simply means "Presence.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.