Quotes About Language

I talked with Quentin about where the character came from, and he told me Kansas City. I don't know how somebody talks from Kansas City, so I made him from New York.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

To me, a big crossover was what happened to me years ago, like bringing my music in Spanish to Europe, or Asia. To me, that's a crossover because Spanish is not a language that everybody talks.

My first year in Japan was very tough, just like my first year in the minors. But at least there I had a lot of Dominican people and Latin people I can talk to. If you don't have anybody to talk to, you can get depressed. But if you find someone who talks your language, it's easier.

'Arrival' talks very little about language and how to precisely dissect a foreign language. It's more a film on intuition and communication by intuition, the language of intuition.

See, Padam Kumar thinks and talks in Tamil and English. So for him, the words in 'Supari' were less important than how they were spoken.

When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves. That is, the relation of the words to the subject must weaken and the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength.

Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.

calling colleagues "customers" puts a wedge between IT and the rest of the business.

Language is powerful. What we say can shape how we think—and it certainly shapes how others think about us. In this regard, calling the business a "customer" simply conveys the idea that IT is not part of the business.

Jerry Fodor, a fierce critic of pragmatist approaches to mind and language, puts this sort of criticism in a nutshell when he says: "First the pragmatist theory of concepts, then the theory theory of concepts, then holism, then relativism. So it goes" (Fodor 1994, p. 111).

From the perspective of the logical empiricists, the pragmatic thinkers were viewed as having seen through a glass darkly what was now seen much more clearly. The myth developed (and unfortunately became entrenched) that pragmatism was primarily an anticipation of logical positivism, in particular, the positivist's verifiability criterion of meaning.

Literate cultures everywhere and throughout history have had words for saying that some people are smarter than others. Given the survival value of intelligence, the concept must be still older than that.

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.

Sometimes it seems that all our words, even those for love, are written in another language. And yet they still arrive, distant, full of their own silences which may be what allows us to invent another story, what saves us. What is the word for the kind of love the woman shows now? A word that contains the whole story the way her lamp contains her room, — Richard Jackson, from "The Whole Story," Resonance: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

Words are weapons. They blast big bloody holes in the world. And words are bricks. Say something out loud and it starts turning solid. Say it out loud enough and it becomes a wall you can't get through.

The limits of my language," wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for." Without the word we are imprisoned; possessing the word, we are set free.

A semicomma, we should note, doesn't exist; we just made the word up. But it sounds like a punctuation mark that should exist, doesn't it?

[S]ometimes... quotation marks are an absolute crime against humanity.

The rules of punctuation seem arbitrary. How can they not, when an apostrophe looks like nothing in this world so much as a comma that can't keep its feet on the ground? Or when, by simply placing next to that wafting comma its twin, one creates (of all things) a quotation mark?

We are now more conscious of the problem of communication itself even in our own language. Familiar words have lost their meaning for many; or the same word means different things to different people. Jargon and cliches usurp the place of discriminating speech in many areas of life.

To provide a foundation in the use of ASL with its unique vocabulary and syntax rules; English as a second language (ESL) instruction

Denton, L., & Silver, M. (2012). Listening and understanding: Language and learning disabilities. In L. Barclay (Ed.), Learning to listen/listening to learn (pp. 372–453). New York, NY: American Foundation for the Blind.

Individuals who are hard of hearing are those in whom the sense of hearing, although defective, is functional either with or without a hearing aid. For these persons, the use of a hearing aid is frequently necessary or desirable to enhance residual hearing (Owens & Farinella, 2019). The extent to which persons with hearing impairment have difficulty developing speech and language is heavily influenced by the degree of hearing loss.