Quotes About Language

the Zulu language has 39 words for green.

Using authentic texts that are too difficult for most language learners, is a little like learning to play the piano. Learners start with easy pieces. Teachers do not ask their pupils to move straight on to music by

Fashion is not a government, is not political; and yet it mantles the world much the way religion does. It includes and enforces its own rules, liturgies, disciplines. It has its own territories, its own language, its own hierarchy.

Sentences that begin with 'You' are probably not true. For instance, when I write: "You are a pet human named Morlock being disciplined by your master, a Beowulf cluster of FreeBSD 22.0 servers in the year 2052. Last week you tried to escape by digging a hole under the perimeter, which means this week you may be put to sleep for being a renegade human." That's not true, at least not yet.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

The praise Greene most valued, however, came not in a review: Faulkner himself wrote in a letter to his British publisher, the contents of which were soon passed on, 'I have also read Mr Greene's THE END OF THE AFFAIR; not one of yours, but for me one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language.'9

Language is a function not only of neurons, not only of "I," but of the meeting of cell and cosmos: the brash Caw of a disembodied intelligence at large in the universe, perhaps even the "voice" of primordial matter. You can hear it in wild turkeys at dawn.

choices depend, in part, on the way in which problems are described.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.

Love's language is hyperbole, but whispered, sibilant similes and promises sotto voce. It's easy to imagine you've misheard

Their books weren't ink marks on paper but God himself compressed between covers. No wonder they often ended up fighting with each other over who had the best words and the best symbols for God.

People today do not know the difference between a bombardier and a brigadier

The preacher gave a fine sermon. He used some big English words I had never heard before because our meetings were taken by the grown-ups in our language. But I remember the tunes of some of them and asked my father afterwards. I suppose I must have got the tunes wrong because although my father tried and said them over again, we never found out what they were and I am still in ignorance to this day.

People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellowmen bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique.

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

When the power of saying is small, the power of thinking is small.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.

IN THE FALL, with his wife in the basement studying Latin, Winston Ma, once Ma Sih Hsuin to everyone who knew him, sits under the crumbling mulberry and, with Verdi's Macbeth blasting out the bedroom window, puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard.

The bookcases are full of previous resolutions, taken up and shelved. No-Sweat Indian Cooking. A Hundred Hikes in the Greater Yellowstone. A Field Guide to Eastern Songbirds. To Eastern Wildflowers. Off the Beaten Path in Europe. Unknown Thailand. Manuals of beer brewing and wine making. Untouched foreign language texts. All those scattered explorations theirs to sample and squander. They have lived like flighty and forgetful gods.

English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide.