Quotes About Language

I think a lot of American fans or people that read about us - they think that we're trying to be a part of the American culture, like all these Swedish kids that love America. We rap in English, so I guess there's something, but we're very Swedish, actually.

I can't learn Swedish to save my life. I tried, but I'm not very good at it.

It may be that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,' but I should be loath to see a rose on a maiden's breast substituted by a flower, however beautiful and fragrant it might be, that is went by the name of the skunk lily.

Gujaratis are really cute people, and I find Gujarati to be a very sweet language.

Gujarati is a very sweet language and I have always used elements from Gujarati songs in my music.

Biscuits are sweet things in Britain, and apparently in America a biscuit is something like a scone, something savory that you'd have with soup.

I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.

To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.

You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Social groups in society don't swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

Look, we have existed for 4,000 years - 2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.

In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home.

I'm very lucky, because it's a combination of the German, the Hebrew, the Swiss, the French, and that accent helped because as soon as people heard it they knew it was me.

Mom spoke to us in Swiss when we were little.

I live the Swiss mentality but the Kosovo mentality too, because when I go home, I speak Albanian.

My English is actually getting worse. We talk Spanish at home and switch to English only when we need it. Like when we go to the bank to get some money.

In Dortmund we had many players from abroad and when you want to put your thoughts in their heads, for example with Pierre-Emerick, you had to switch to English, which is the language most players understand.

I use this method to bring emotion into my performance. I recite my lines in English first, and then switch back to the original lines when shooting begins.

The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.

When I have to switch back and forth, it's not hard to go from the American accent to speaking Spanish, but then speaking Spanish and going back into the American accent is hard. I practice it so much. I talk to myself in the mirror all the time. It's like speaking multiple languages.

My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough.

Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.

I believe the switch from 'lady' to 'woman' was part of the women's movement. 'Lady' was a euphemism for 'woman,' and that was one reason that we wanted to move away from it.