Quotes About Language

Words are vehicles of ideas, and unless they are understood properly misunderstanding is inevitable.

They had nationalities even: Thai eggplant, Chinese eggplant, Italian eggplant. The United Nations of eggplants terrified me because I knew the oblong purple vegetable as baingan, brinjal in English, and I could cook it in five different ways. Would this exotic brinjal still yield to my hands?

NEOLOGISMO Beijo pouco, falo menos ainda. Mas invento palavras Que traduzem a ternura mais funda E mais cotidiana. Inventei, por exemplo, o verbo teadorar. Intransitivo: Teadoro, Teodora.

Era uno de esos pedantes que tanto abundaban a la sazón, siervos del paganismo resucitado, de quienes Erasmo se mofa porque sólo consideraban verdaderamente latinas las palabras que Cicerón incluyó en su léxico.

Pero ya es sabido que la elocuencia está en el oído de quien oye.

La lengua de las mariposas es una tronca enroscada como un muelle de reloj. Si hay una flor que la atrae, la desenrolla y la mete en el cáliz para chupar. Cuando lleváis el dedo humedecido a un tarro de azúcar, ¿a qué sentís ya el dulce en la boca como si la yema fuese la punta de la lengua? Pues así es la lengua de la mariposa.

Hay cosas que no pueden decirse, y es cierto. Pero esto que no puede decirse, es lo que se tiene que escribir.

La palabra es libertad.

No hay menos belleza en una exacta ecuación q en una frase precisa. Pero cada ciencia tiene su propio lenguaje estético

Ve? sam ti rekao da prestaneš da se bojiš rije?i. Važno je da koristimo prave rije?i.

Boys like to fight, and of course, it's in their nature. But as they grow up and their vocabulary expands, they will find the right words to express themselves and the violence will subside. Brutality is just the result of frustration, the incapacity to express oneself in words. Without words, people often resort to fists.

English had been used since the start of the seventh century to draft administrative documents,

Not only did the Normans bring with them new forms of architecture and fortifications, new military techniques, a new ruling elite and a new language of government; they also imported a new set of attitudes and morals, which impinged on everything from warfare to politics to religion to law and even the status of the peasantry. More of these changes could be grouped under the heading 'national identity.' The Conquest matters, in short, because it altered what it meant to be English,

Remarkably, this Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (as it was later known) was written not in Latin, as was the practice in virtually every other literate corner of Europe, but in the everyday language that people spoke. By the end of the tenth century, this language had a name for the new state: it was 'the land of the Angles', Engla lond.4

Thus I discovered that if one is the least bit welcoming in one's treatment of it, a word never comes alone. It brings along with it all those that belong to its clan...102

For people to understand me when I travel, I speak with my hands.

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

Les mots qui ont un son noble contiennent toujours de belles images.

I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.

That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people desire from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life.

Assim trocamos palavras mentirosas. Mas uma verdade mais profunda do que a que diríamos se fôssemos sinceros pode às vezes ser expressa e anunciada por outro meio que não o da sinceridade.

You may not have heard, Duke, that there is a new word to describe that sort of attitude," said the archivist, who was Secretary to the Committee against Reconsideration, "One says 'mentality.' It means exactly the same thing, but it has the advantage that nobody knows what you're talking about. It's the ne plus ultra just now, the 'latest thing,' as they say.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.