Quotes About Language

Thought is the fountain of speech.

People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn't there?

The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words, so that I can talk to him?

The main language of this conglomeration of tribes was a Turkish tongue. The Turkic peoples are historically and linguistically linked with T'uchüeh, the name given by the Chinese to the nomadic peoples who founded their empire stretching from Mongolia and the

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

Did you just say shrug instead of actually shrugging?

I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.

in the outer city, the northern accents clamoring around

Lebih oenting dari bahasa kata-kata yang tertulis adalah bahasa yang keluar dari lubuk hati.

So sorry," she bit out with the sweetness of alum, "but you're going to have to translate that one for me. I'm not fluent in brooding male grunting.

Mairidh mo ghaol gu siorraidh, Ivy Calhoun," he says, and I already know that means "I'll love you forever.

A broadcast about wolves, with recordings of their howls. What a language! The most heartrending I know, and I shall never forget it. From now on, in moments of excessive solitude, I need merely recall those sounds to have the sense of belonging to a community.

Models of style: the swearword, the telegram, the epitaph.

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves.

Put simply, birds talk. They discuss everything and every one. They talk to each other. They talk to potential and existing partners. They discuss territories, predators and other animals using a combination of calls, songs and body language.

Pepys was a good scholar, able to read Latin for pleasure all his life; and that very skill may have helped to leave his English free and uncluttered for the Diary, the language of life as opposed to the elaborately constructed formulations of the classroom and study.

application of force. How much else have I not registered? Her prosody

leaves out verbs and articles and pronouns and prepositions, in what those who know autism call "telegraphic speech.

Along the way, I picked up an Old Scots word for dreariness: dreich. The man who taught it to me sold gorgeous cashmere scarves made in Scotland and had just finished reciting a Robert Burns poem to me. Dreich, he explained, "means . . . nothingness." He pointed outside and said, "It means that," referring to the gray spitty skies that hadn't once shown the sun while I'd been there. Dreich. A perfect word both in sound and meaning.

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?

Aside from a few odd words in Hebrew, I took it completely for granted that God had never spoken anything but the most dignified English.

Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.

The word is my fourth dimension.

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But - I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.