Quotes About Language

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.

In fact, when you think about it, if a word from the street occurs in a book it is not the writer who is guilty, but the readers, and primarily those readers belonging to the upper classes: for they are the ones who will never utter a single decent Russian word; their speech is so abundantly stuffed with every manner of French, German, and English words that you want to block your ears...

Ah! I--to you, Petrovitch, this--" It must be known that Akakiy Akakievitch expressed himself chiefly by prepositions, adverbs, and scraps of phrases which had no meaning whatever.

the ladies of N. were pre-eminently careful and refined in their choice of words and phrases. Never did a lady say, "I blew my nose," or "I perspired," or "I spat." No, it had to be, "I relieved my nose through the expedient of wiping it with my handkerchief," and so forth.

Ukrainian was to Gogol "the language of the soul," and it was in Ukrainian songs rather than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little contemptuous, that he read the history of his people.

Music is the only media I will use to speak and connect to you.

It was a kind of sin, certainly, to forget—but it was not easy to remember, especially when names changed, languages changed. A century-old name held that century; when replaced, a hundred years were wiped out at one stroke. Amnesia set it; reality itself, being metamorphic, was affected.

Sanskrit, the language of the sutras, is particularly well suited to this heart-centered approach because it is a vibrational language, one in which words resonate through countless layers of meaning.

Por vezes Mary falava e Fara escutava uma efusão de gaélico que não compreendia; por vezes era Fara que falava a Língua para uma Mary completamente em branco. Curiosamente, as palavras não eram importantes. O que importava era a representação das emoções nas expressões do rosto, a expressividade das mãos, o que a voz transmitia, segredos que os olhos contavam

Though the language spoken here appears to be the same, the meaning of each word can be vastly different. What they mean when they say freedom. What they mean when they say equal. What they mean when they say fair.

His job is to communicate information and ideas, and how is he supposed to do that when language itself has become meaningless?

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.

We thus make a fundamental distinction between the competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations).

Women and men communicate differently, often on entirely different planes. But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn't there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech.

Os vivos comunicam-se mutuamente numa linguagem que, em grande medida, foi moldada pelos mortos. Assim, os mortos se vingam dos vivos por violarem seus valores.

To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement o man.

Mandelbrot's theoretical results fit very closely the word distribution in many actual languages, indicating that there is a certain natural selection among them, and that the form of a language which survives by the very fact of its use and survival has been driven to take something not too remotely resembling an optimum form of distribution.

an adequate theory of language as a game should distinguish between these two varieties of language, one of which is intended primarily to convey information and the other primarily to impose a point of view against a willful opposition. I do not know if any philologist has yet made the technical observations and theoretical propositions which are necessary to distinguish these two classes of language for our purposes, but I am quite sure that they are substantially different forms.

It is quite clear that if left alone, babies will make attempts at speech. These attempts, however, show their own inclinations to utter something, and do not follow any existing form of language. It is almost equally clear that if a community of children were left out of contact with the language of their seniors through the critical speech-forming years, they would emerge with something, which crude as it might be, would be unmistakably a language.

authoritarian institutions, such as governments and churches, do not use language but jargon, repetitive phrases that are not supposed to have meaning but merely enforce obedience. Language has its own internalizing ethic; it is individualistic and thus threatening to any monolithic system that demands a chorus or litany.

One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if 'Scottishness' or 'Englishness' were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements.

the Welsh name for 'England', Lloegr, meant 'the Lost Land', I fell for the fancy, imagining what a huge sense of loss and forgetting the name expresses. A learned colleague has since told me that my imagination had outrun the etymology. Yet as someone brought up in English surroundings, I never cease to be amazed that everywhere which we now call 'England' was once not English at all.

Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person's ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue.