Quotes About Language

he never felt that way about Japanese - even though he didn't understand it. The fluid monotonic sound of it alone made it a far more beautiful and spiritual language. English, with its heavy stresses and wobbly intonation, was dirty and repugnant to his ears

English, with its heavy stresses and wobbly intonation, was dirty and repugnant to his ears

The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

The Germanic tone… it's very calm yet quietly confident. I bet Germans were really cool, whoever they were back on Earth. They sound peaceful and meditative.

How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.

You speak very good English for an American.

She had found that people, especially people who spoke a different tongue, would get anxious if they didn't get to have their say in their own way, even if they spoke in a long rush, burying to get their words out.

Sitting in the fire in the summer evening as Hild the daughter of the might-have-been king, not Hild the seer of the overking, speaking nothing but British, she felt her face setting in a new shape, happier, younger.

Aud rhymes with cowed.

He could send his words trilling into the roof corners or scuttling through floor rushes.

You might have been talking gibberish, but your smile was radiant.

Aud rhymes with shroud.

As always when she was trying to learn a new language, she opened her mind and let the sound wash through it.

Hild realised that every shape the man's body made refused the words, and the bard was nodding along. The bard had made the speech.

She had no idea why it was so much harder for her to folk in Anglisc to anyone but Begu, it just was, though these last weeks she was learning how to let the words come. It helped if there was no weightiness behind them, no import; if they were only words with no life or death hanging in the balance.

All she heard was a blackbird, far away, and the burble of the spring. She wondered where the water came from. She wondered this in British, the language of wild and secret places.

The scop's chant moved majestically from folk and fold to hearth and hall, wealth and wire, his rolling Anglics now transmuted into the language of flame, and gold and honour.

Poetry rescues things by reconciling matter and spirit in the metaphor.

Sólo las letras antiguas curan la sarna moderna.

There are words for deceiving others, like "rational." And others, like "dialectic," for deceiving oneself.

Let us beware of discourse where the adjective "natural" without quotation marks abounds: somebody is deceiving himself, or wants to deceive us. From natural borders to natural religion.

El gran arte literario está en presentar con plenitud plástica lo inefable.

Mehr als eine ideologische Strategie ist die Linke eine Lexikographische Taktik.

La oscuridad de un texto no es defecto cuando lo que dice sólo puede decirse oscuramente.