Quotes About Language

to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life.

Whilst a word like "impede" survived, its opposite, "expede," did not.

English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion. Occasionally there is desperate resuscitation from a few survivors who know that to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life. Only writing preserves a language.

Word endings fell away. Prepositions came in which took the language away from the Germanic and made it more English. Instead of adding a lump on the end of words, you could use 'to' or 'with'. 'I gave the dog to my daughter.' 'I cut the meat with my knife.' The order of words became important and prepositions became more common as signposts around sentences.

Old English 'æppel' used to mean any kind of fruit.

Escribir bien cuesta. Por escribir bien entiendo decir con la máxima simplicidad las cosas esenciales.

The term machine learning entered the lexicon in 1959, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

I despise the way blackness in the English language, symbolizes death and negativity. Because I believe that the absorption of these connotations contributes to self-hate, I avoid them at all cost.

everybody was a lady—the fish lady, the yam lady, the store lady, the teacher lady'.6 She noticed, however, many instances of self-contempt. 'When I was a child,' she said, 'nearly everything about us was bad, you know; they would tell yuh seh yuh have bad hair, that black people bad… and that the language yuh talk was bad. And I know that a lot of people I knew were not bad at all, they were nice people and they talked this language.'7

We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.

I doubt it with a silent B.

Rir junto é melhor do que falar a mesma língua. Ou talvez o riso seja uma língua anterior que fomos perdendo à medida que o mundo foi deixando de ser nosso.

O silêncio não é a ausência da fala, é o dizer-se tudo sem nenhuma palavra.

Ensinar a ler é sempre ensinar a transpor o imediato. é ensinar a escolher entre sentidos visíveis e sentidos invisíveis. é ensinar a pensar no sentido original da palavra "pensar" que significava "curar ou "tratar" um ferimento.

Todos nós somos impossíveis tradutores de sonhos. Na verdade, os sonhos falam em nós o que nenhuma palavra sabe dizer.

Eu já me estou a desmulatar. (...) Eu estou é a ficar branco de língua, deve ser porque só falo português....

A gargalhada é mulher, o riso é masculino.

Demasio-me nesta palavração

Às vezes, as línguas fazem-nos ser.

Ocupada en darles nombre, se le ha escapado su historia.

O português confessa sentir inveja de não ter duas línguas. E poder usar uma delas para perder o passado. E outra para ludibriar o presente.

Search "Power words" on Google and you'll find plenty of them. Or

In some senses, the Finns can be considered über-Scandinavians.

I hear noises coming from his mouth but they don't sound like words," Daphne said.