Quotes About Language

English is in fact the most Latin, and the most French, among Germanic languages, while French - for reasons that we will see - is the most Germanic among Latin languages. The French and English languages share a symbiotic relationship, and that should come as no surprise, as their histories have been inextricably linked for the past ten centuries.

Few anglophones realize that by keeping French words in the "upper stratum" of their discourse, they are granting French a lofty position in their language and culture. As they export English all around the world, French and its high status have become part of the package. It's one of the least-known explanations for the resilience of French today.

some reason the French love to laugh at Belgians. Belgian jokes are like Newfie jokes in Canada or Vermont jokes in New England (we can testify that the same cookie-cutter stories circulate freely between languages).

Cette fois-ci j'ai choisi un axe, sans m'interdire pour autant d'emprunter quelques chemins de traverse, et cet axe je l'ai défini dès les premières lignes comme étant ma relation au langage (il se peut que ce livre ne soit qu'une version personnelle des Mots de Sartre...).

Sartre, je le jugeai plus tard sinon tout à fait gagné par la folie des mots, du moins, dans la lutte exténuante qu'il a toujours menée contre elle, enclin, corydrane aidant, à y céder.

It was the French of the Normans that, grafting itself onto the barbaric Saxon tongue, gave it its most magnificent blossoming. And, in these new countries, where both English and French are intertwined again, it is as if English were bathing itself in the fountain of its own youth, and as if French were remembering the buried treasures it had thought forgotten.

In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag.

N'ayons pas peur des mots. Ils n'ont pas peur de nous.

Si ricordò di alcune riflessioni che aveva annotato di recente sul suo quadernetto. A proposito della povertà di vocabolario riguardante il mare. Solo i greci avevano tante parole per definirlo. Hals, il sale, il mare in quanto materia. Pelagos, la distesa d'acqua, il mare come visione, spettacolo. Pontos, il mare spazio e via di comunicazione. Thalassa, il mare in quanto evento. Kolpos, lo spazio marittimo che abbraccia la riva, il golfo o la baia...

Speech therapy is an art that deserves to be more widely known. You cannot imagine the acrobatics your tongue mechanically performs in order to produce all the sounds of a language.

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Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.

A new problem appears: devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof - and that means no verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is the wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established.

To transform the unconscious into discourse is to bypass the dynamics, to become complicit with the whole of Western ratio, which kills art at the same time as the dream. One does not in the least break with metaphysics by placing language everywhere.

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

La clarté est la souveraine politesse de qui manie une plume . (Clarity is the sovereign politeness of the one who wields a pen.)

she was a book lover who enjoyed reading aloud to her baby. She liked the idea that, even before he understood them, he might begin with the most beautiful words, that he'd build language from a foundation of literature and poetry.

Lydia's English is a help, but there are many different languages in el norte. There are codes Lydia hasn't yet learned to decipher, subtle differences between words that mean almost, but not quite the same thing: migrant, immigrant, illegal alien. She learns that there are flags that people use here, and those flags may be a warning or a welcome. She is learning.

From the Author's Note: In my conversations with Mexican people, I seldom heard the word American used to describe a citizen of this country – instead they use a word we don't even have in English estadounidense, United States-ian.

Luca likes to listen to the foreign sounds, the peaks and rolls of the words he doesn't understand. He likes the way voices sound the same in every language, the way, if you train your ear to listen just outside the words, to only the shifting inflections, you can attach your own meaning to the sounds.

Por mais que ame as palavras, por vezes elas são completamente insuficientes.

He mispronounces the word hombres in the style of the US president who, attempting to call migrants bad men, inadvertently referred to them as bad hunger instead. It's a joke now, full of irony. Bad hunger. El comandante toes the line.