Quotes About Language

But I could if I took the time and sweat to learn the language of electronics; it's not miraculous—just complex. Teleportation is simple, once you learn the language—it's the language that is difficult.

No. 'Grok' is the most important word in the language—and I expect to spend years trying to understand it.

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.

But don't worry; almost no one in this ship speaks System English and she isn't one of the few. They talk their 'secret language' -- only it isn't secret; it's just Finnish.

Spanish is so musical that a soap powder commercial in Spanish is more pleasing to the ear than the best free verse in English—the Spanish language is so beautiful that much of its poetry sounds best if the listener does not understand the meaning.

The notion of the Bible as literature, though particularly contaminated in English by its use as a rubric for superficial college courses and for dubious publishers' packages, is needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language. (It would at the very least be gratuitous to speak of Dante as literature, given the assured literary status of Dante's great poem, though the Divine Comedy is more explicitly theological, or religious, than most of the Bible.)

The Hebrew narrator does not openly meddle with the personages he presents, just as God creates in each human personality a fierce tangle of intentions, emotions, and calculations caught in a translucent net of language, which is left for the individual himself to sort out in evanescence of a single lifetime. -Chapter 4 Between Narration and Dialogue

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

G.W.F. Hegel . He's perfect, Weishaupt wrote.... Unlike Kant , who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language.

If the word ''fuck'' is ''obscene'' or ''dirty'', why isn't the word ''duck'' 75% ''dirty''?

You asked me what linguistics I find most pernicious. I started with is. The either/or habit is very pernicious. It seems very pernicious to me, I mean. Two-valued situations are relatively rare, actually.

ETIC REALITY: the hypothetical actuality that has not been filtered through the emic reality of a human nervous system or linguistic grid. If you have anything to say about Etic Reality without using words or any other symbols, please send a full description of it to the author at once.

And that reminded me--as everything in the universe does--of Finnegans Wake. Now, I'm sure in an educated audience like this, you're all thoroughly familiar with Finnegans Wake, and I don't have to explain its deep structure or its polylinguistic meanings.

REALITY-TUNNEL: An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism.

Furthermore, what you can say about what you saw depends on the structure of your symbolism — whether you describe it in English, Persian, Chinese, Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, differential calculus or quaternions. This explains why, in Dr. Jones's words, whatever we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it.

Why do we say "dumb" (mute) for stupid? Because "a good mind means a good mouth," and the human mind is a verbalizing circuit.

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the is of identity from the English language. (The is of identity takes the form X is a Y. E.g., Joe is a Communist, Mary is a dumb file-clerk, The universe is a giant machine, etc.) In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words is or to be and the Bourland proposal (English without isness) he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

One is reminded of a story about Mark Twain and his very fashionable and respectable New England wife, who once tried to cure him of his salty riverboat speech. Mrs. Twain noted every cuss word he used all week long and then woke him Sunday morning and read it all back to him. Twain listened calmly and commented, You have the words, my dear, but you haven't got the music yet.

If you hypnotized somebody and told him not to use the word "nose," and then asked him to explain the sense of smell, you would get the same kind of drifting linguistic snow banks in his answers. Intellectuals, who have more abstractions stored in their biocomputers, are more skilled at this than most, but all can do it to some extent.

The semantic time-binding system makes a feedback loop between the verbal left brain hemisphere, the larynx, the right hand (which manipulates the world and checks the accuracy of maps or glosses) and the eyes (which read words and also scan the environment).

In Standard English we may discuss all sorts of metaphysical and spooky matters, often without noticing that we have entered the realms of theology and demonology, whereas in English Prime we can only discuss actual experiences (or transactions) in the space-time continuum. English Prime may not automatically transfer us into a scientific universe, in all cases, but it at least transfers us into existential or experiential modes, and takes us out of medieval theology.

More subtle and alarming issues arise when we consider the structure of a system of metaphors interlinked into a code or language.

Rewriting in English Prime we find John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office and John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach. We have left the realm of spooks and re-entered the existential or phenomenological world of actual experiences in space-time. And, lo and behold, another metaphysical contradiction has disappeared in the process.

To say John is anything, incidentally, always opens the door to spooks and metaphysical debate. The historical logic of Aristotelian philosophy as embedded in Standard English always carries an association of stasis with every is, unless the speaker or writer remembers to include a date, and even then linguistic habit will cause many to not notice the date and assume is means a stasis (an Aristotelian timeless essence or spook).