Quotes About Language

It has turned out, in fact, to be far harder to translate teleological into non-teleological language than had been anticipated by philosophers; or at any rate, by philosophers friendly towards Darwinism (as virtually all the writers in question are). Whether such translation is possible at all is more than anyone knows. As

thus animals without symbolic language may lack the ability humans have to deliberately think about the past and imagine the future.

Stones are raw, they blunt my paw, but words will never hurt me.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

The story of the English writing system is so intriguing, and the histories behind individual words so fascinating, that anyone who dares to treat spelling as an adventure will find the journey rewarding.

There is little scientific data on the point, but evidently people do speak to themselves.

Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.

People sometimes say: 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' That's true. But language is never far away. To talk about the picture, you may need a thousand words.

This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.

The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It

Intonation is the use of pitch to convey meaning in a language. It has been described as the music or melody of speech.

The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.

Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.

Mixed accents are the norm these days. Even if you don't travel, you're not immune from accent shift. Innumerable voices enter your home every day through radio, television, the telephone, and the internet.

Faced with the sentence therapistsneedspecialtreatment we need to know if this is a text about sex crimes or about speech pathology before we can correctly read it aloud.

Information is always being left out, therefore, when speech is written down. And conversely, information is always being added when a written text is spoken aloud.

Old attitudes die hard, of course, and there will still be those who mourn the passing of the days when a single accent ruled the British airwaves. But they are a steadily shrinking minority.

The reality is that accent distinctiveness is nothing to do with physical environment, but a result of the combination of regional and social factors that have influenced the emergence of a particular community.

modern spoken Tamil is astonishingly rich in Sanskrit loan words. Indeed, there may well be more straight Sanskrit in Tamil than in the Sanskrit-derived north Indian vernaculars.

A critical element in nearly all effective social movements is leadership. For it is through smart, persistent, and authoritative leaders that a movement generates the appropriate concepts and language that captures the frustration, anger, or fear of the group's members and places responsibility where it is warranted.

Dictionaries stop where the heart starts.

Les mots n'ont pas toujours besoin d'une destination. On les laisse s'arrêter aux frontières des sensations. Errant sans tête dans l'espace du trouble. Et c'est bien là le privilège des artistes : vivre dans la confusion.

Las palabras no siempre necesitan un destino. Se les permite detenerse en las fronteras de las sensaciones.