Quotes About Language

Las interpretaciones musicales, desde el lastimero punteado de una simple cuerda de violín, hasta el frenesí vertiginoso del rock, ¿celebran cada una a su manera la evolución victoriosa de las señales auditivas sobre las señales visuales, el nacimiento del lenguaje y el comienzo del extraordinario vuelo de las culturas humanas?

Love is not singular except in syllable.

first recorded example of a man telling a woman to 'shut up';

Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say. It is an idiom that effectively repositions women back into the domestic sphere (people 'whinge' over things like the washing up); it trivialises their words, or it 're-privatises' them.

Democracy' (demokratia) was rooted politically and linguistically in the Greek world. It was never a rallying cry at Rome, even in its limited ancient sense or even for the most radical of Roman popular politicians. In most of the conservative writing that survives, the word means something close to 'mob rule'. There is little point in asking how 'democratic' the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.

Cicero's eloquence, even if only half understood, still informs the language of modern politics.

letters of Cicero

In fact, the modern word 'candidate' derives from the Latin candidatus, which means 'whitened' and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters.

Muchos romanos ricos hablaban algo de griego, mejor que el latín que podían saber los teanos, pero no siempre demasiado bien. Se sabía que los griegos de verdad se burlaban despiadadamente del terrible acento romano.

Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say.

The name 'Romulus' is itself a give-away. Although Romans usually assumed that he had lent his name to his newly established city, we are now fairly confident that the opposite was the case: 'Romulus' was an imaginative construction out of 'Roma'. 'Romulus' was merely the archetypal 'Mr Rome'. Besides

The Latin word for 'rams', rostra, became the name of the platform and gave modern English its word 'rostrum'.

the brogue tripping from his tongue like a slashed wineskin.

You have to understand accounting and you have to understand the nuances of accounting. It's the language of business and it's an imperfect language, but unless you are willing to put in the effort to learn accounting - how to read and interpret financial statements - you really shouldn't select stocks yourself. - Warren Buffett

The dang man could tell a good story fluffed with terms like gonna do and want to do but he never quite grasped the idea of did.

The extreme idealist or formalist thinks of language in terms of how completely it represents the tiger, and since it can never fully get that right, would rather lapse into silence than speak.

There was an unwritten rule that hearing people who knew sign should identify themselves whenever they were around Deaf people. Otherwise the Deaf people might be carrying on an extremely private conversation, assuming no one around them could understand them. To not identify yourself was a betrayal of trust.

It never ceased to amaze Lacey how ignorant people were about deafness. Forget understanding Deaf Culture. Forget hearing people respecting them as a linguistic community with a shared history, language, and pride. That was way beyond most hearing people's understanding. Their perspective was that of pity, impairment, and fixing. Lacey was proud to be a Deaf woman, wouldn't want to become hearing for anything in the world.

American Sign Language was her language, her birthright, not some subpar substitute for English.

What is love at first sight but a proof of the powerful but silent language of physiognomy?

To a child's ear, "mother" is magic in any language.

After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes. He said, No hablo ingles.

Maybe in order to understand mankind we have to look at that word itself. MANKIND. Basically, it's made up of two separate words mank and ind. What do these words mean? It's a mystery and that's why so is mankind.

The verb 'to love' in Persian is 'to have a friend.' 'I love you' translated literally is 'I have you as a friend,' and 'I don't like you' simply means 'I don't have you as a friend.