Quotes About Language

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

Rather, it is from the blather, rather, I am made.

Marriage opens a joint account in the language bank, with 'we' as the currency, and that pronoun yokes two individual identities with different stakes in marriage.

When a people has lost homeland and liberty, their language takes the place of a nation and of everything," observed

Yet as a national spoken tongue, Italian, practically born yesterday, is nuovissimo

English may be the language everyone needs to know, but Italian is the language people want to learn. With

Americans see Italian "come una lingua polisensoriale capace di aprire le porte al bello" ("as a multi sensory language able to open the gates to beauty").

Italians basic word chest, as tallied in a recent dictionary, totals a measly 200,000, compared to English's 600,000 (not counting technical terms). But

Se io studiassi di più l'italiano, lo parlerei meglio.

As I mulled over the words of its giants, I realized that I was unconsciously moving my hands beneath my cape in the very same ways that I do when I speak Italian. And I was speaking Italian—to myself! My teachers had predicted that someday this milestone of a moment would come, that

many diverse people of intelligence and refinement, outside Italy no less than within Italy, devote much effort and study to learning and speaking our language for no reason but love." These acolytes included Elizabeth I of England, Francis I of France, and Emperor Charles V, who once declared, "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." John

I hold Petrarch at leastly partly responsible for the disconcerting gap between Italian's written and spoken vocabularies. The

Perhaps because of this Babel of dialects, Italians cultivated an alternative language: gestures. In

The first book printed in Lithuanian was an edition of Luther's Short Catechism, published in (Polish) Ducal Prussia at Königsberg in 1547; the Luther Catechism was the second published work in the related language of Lettic, at Königsberg in 1586.

English was a complex hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and Norse, with a strong overlay of Norman-French, and was difficult for outsiders to learn fluently because of its consequent lack of linguistic logic.

Nationalism is a phenomenon of the world after the 1789 French Revolution; it implies a common consciousness created within a consolidated territory, usually involving a single language and shared culture, producing a public rhetoric of a single national will, and with the agenda of creating or reinforcing a unitary state.

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

Lo poco que entendían algunos comerciantes a sus clientes no dejaba nunca de desconcertarlo.

The fact that we do not speak it but sing it only expresses the fact that our spoken words are inadequate to express what we want to say, that the burden of our song goes far beyond all human words.

The day will come … when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus's language, so that people will be alarmed, and yet overcome by its power—the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God's kingdom is drawing near."[56]

Though Urdu is the mother tongue of only 5 percent of Pakistanis, it is the official language of the state and is taught in schools nationwide.

Even after the Hellenistic empire of Alexander's successors was supplanted by that of the Latin-speaking Romans, the usual linguistic development – the language of the empire imposing itself on cultural activities – did not take place, and even philosophers whose mother tongue was not Greek did philosophy not in Latin but in Greek.

To be sure, there were attempts at translating the philosophy that was written in Greek into other languages – the presumed intention being to implant it in the cultures of the target languages – but such attempts, in the end, did not produce the intended results.