Quotes About Language

All things human begin with words.

In ancient times only women could do math; men were thought too stupid. That's why the root for the word math is the same as for mother—they both come from the name of the Egyptian goddess, Maat. Mathematics literally means 'mother wisdom.

You may find it interesting that the word Solomon is comprised of three smaller words—the Latin 'sol,' the Hindu 'om,' and the Egyptian 'on'—all of which mean sun in their respective language.

Poetry became his favorite genre; he memorized poetic lyrics and recited them often. For him, poetry organized and crystalized experience as no other type of language did.

Names are an important key to what a society values. Anthropologists recognize naming as 'one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception.'

The alphabet was an invention below stairs.

An anonymously written piece about 1900 has the letter H complaining to the Cockneys that it has been banished "from 'ouse, from 'ome, from 'ope, from 'eaven; and placed by your most learned society in Hexile, Hanguish and Hanxiety.

Likewise, India's Hindi and Pakistan's Urdu are fundamentally the same tongue, only using Devanagari script in India, Arabic letters in Pakistan. And Yiddish, while not exactly German, is closely akin to it. Yet Yiddish is written in Hebrew letters, and German in Roman ones.

The Phoenician alphabet of 1000 B.C. would become the great-grandmother of our own. About 19 of our letters can be traced back directly—in their shapes, their alphabetical sequence, and, for most, their sounds—to Phoenician counterparts. Ours is not the only descendant. As shown in the "Family Tree of the World's Alphabets" (this page), the Phoenician alphabet has been the source for nearly every subsequent alphabet, past and present.

The Phoenicians were Semites, akin in ethnic group and language to the ancient Jews. Phoenician speech would have sounded much like ancient Hebrew. Israel—the Jewish kingdom of David and Solomon—

Our word "Phoenician" comes from ancient Greek. Phoinikes, "red people," was what the Greeks called them, probably in reference to their copper skin color.

vowel" coming via medieval French from the Latin adjective vocalis, "using the voice.

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the Egyptian word for "there.

Modern experts now believe the alphabet was invented sometime around 2000 B.C. by Semites who dwelled as foreigners in pharaoh's Egypt;

In his wonderful 1529 book on the alphabet, 'Champ Fleury,' (French Renaissance scholar and type designer Geofroy) Tory deals gently but firmly with H: "The aspirate is not a letter; nonetheless it is by poetic licence given place as a letter.

Art is more than a sum of cultural signs: It is a language both direct and associative, and has a grammar and syntax like any other human communication. The act of paying close attention to what someone made, in all of its particulars, is what stimulates an authentic, as opposed to a conditioned, response.

Furniture or gold can be taken away from you, but knowledge and a new language can easily be taken from one place to the other, and nobody can take them away from you.

If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit...

Language The clichéd image of an alien emerging from a flying saucer and declaring 'Take me to your leader' highlights one problem in alien narratives. As soon as aliens speak, their otherness becomes compromised, because we associate language with a way of life and view it as one of the defining characteristics of humanity. One way out of this impasse in early SF was to use the convenience of an instant translation device.

It seems symbolic that I can't write my name anymore," she told Mr. Nosy.

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