Quotes About Language

We needed fish, really, but I could not speak Fish.

Bindy Mackenzie talks like a horse.

There is no right or wrong; there is no one truth, there are lots of truths. And you girls should translate the world into as many different languages as possible. If you see the world in just one language, your world becomes too small.

T he name of the father of Genghis Khan is a word which can not be pronounced exactly in English. It sounded something like this, Yezonkai Behadr,

T he name of the father of Genghis Khan is a word which can not be pronounced exactly in English. It sounded something like this, Yezonkai Behadr, with the accent on the last syllable, Behadr, and the a sounded like a in hark. This is as near as we can come to it; but the name, as it was really pronounced by the Mongul people, can not be written in English letters nor spoken with English sounds. Orthography of Mongul names.

We treat ourselves both as objects of language and as speakers of language, both as objects of the symbolism and as symbols in it. And all the difficult paradoxes which go right back to Greek times and reappear in modern mathematics depend essentially on this.

Le langage est, en effet, l'instrument même de la pensée, et le seul moyen de lui donner des contours fermes.

Talking is existing.

There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death's enormity.

Orba (feminine), the Latin word for orphaned, parentless, childless, widowed. There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death's enormity. But it has. Orbus, orba, orbum, orbi, orbae, orborum, orbo, orbis...

Letters becoming words, words gathering meaning, becoming thoughts outside my head becoming sentences written by Jacqueline Amanda Woodson

I know in my heart , Tiago whispered, the language we like to speak is music and poetry and even cold, sweet piraguas on hot, hot summer days. But it feels like this place wants to break my heart. It feels like every day it tries to make my mom feel tinier and tinier, like the size of Perrito's head in my hands.

Then for a moment like so many times before this I lost the words. Watched them drop . . . No. Dissipate . . . from the air between us. Dissipate. The word has shown up on my SAT prep tests again and again until it landed in this room with us. Between my mother. And me.

That's what up , Amari said. Read those poems in all kinds of American, son.

His mouth came to hers suddenly, hovering above those thirsting lips as he drilled her with the intensity of his mercury gaze. " Neliss . . . " he murmured, reverting to the elegance of their ancient language. " Neliss ent desita." Beauty of the ages.

The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out.

It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual.

Simple English is no one's mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

First Principle: Have a point and make it by means of the best word.

We are thus led to ask what the writer looks for and how he trains himself to look for it. The answer is: he makes himself habitually aware of words, positively self conscience of them about them, careful to follow what they might say and not to jump to what they might mean.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable

There is nothing outside of the text.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.