Quotes About Language

You can't walk across a lake just because you change its name to "land." Labels matter.

After just a week in the hospital, I felt I'd left America for another country. My world was a land of fluorescent lights where day and night were the same, and where more than half the citizens spoke Spanish. When they spoke English it wasn't what I expected in the land of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn't trickled down to this zip code. Three

Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath Ã¢â'¬Â¦ The language of love was the same as the language of medicine

If one could read fluently, confidently, in every known language, one would have no need of translators or translations; one could read Homer on Mondays, Akhmatova on Tuesdays, Swahili poets on Wednesdays, and so on.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

we swim in our second language, we breathe in our first

But I held her in my heart, and would stay with her all my days, even if a great many of them were trying ones. If love dictated only in Russian, I would learn that thorny tongue.

Taki ukaz, zabraniaj?cy uczy? si?, nie ma przek?adu w dziejach i jest oryginalnym rosyjskim wymys?em.

The language of the King James Bible is the language of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.

There are 201 words in the Iliad and the Odyssey that occur only once in Homer and never again in the whole of Greek literature.

The first psychoanalytic patients were people who, by definition, did not fit in, people speaking the wrong language, a language of bizarre physical symptoms, a language very unlike the language of science, and for which science suggested itself as the great explainer. These people were suffering, in Freud's view...from the ordeals of intimacy.

YOU have no room to laugh, that's all. I'm not doing any worse with Boovish than you did with English.' Get off of the car,' J.Lo huffed. 'I am an English superstar.' Uh-uh. There's no comparison. 'Gratuity' in written Boovish has seventeen different bubbles that all have to be the right size and in the right place. 'J.Lo' in written English only has three letters, and you still spelled it 'M-smiley face-pound sign.

A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fianc'e; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying.

To say a word once is communicative, to say it twice is emphatic, but to say it twenty times turns it into a trippy floating nothing.

Talk is what we have, what makes us distinctive. Talk to us is what webs are to a spider, or speed to a gazelle.' 'Talk is how we bring what's inside our minds into the outside world,' Albie said. 'Animals have feelings and thoughts. Animals have always had feelings and thoughts – it's just that only now have they been able to bring them out.

Whichever way speech and language emerged in humans, it was a transition, with all those necessary but not sufficient pieces being nudged in one way or the other, by chance, by selection. The fact that it was a transition, not a revolution, means it took time.

They may have shaped the lands and defined and defended borders, and given us the days of the week (and hundreds of other words: "a berserk freckly husband is a blundering guest in hell"), but they don't appear to have left any distinctive DNA.

I've learned to write by mimicking other writers. It's the way we learned to speak—reproducing sounds—and it's the way, I think, to learn how to write.

the original "Israelite" view gradually became "foreign" and unintelligible. The Shema could only be understood as affirming the later "truth" of Jewish monotheism. This authentically Israelite religious language seems to have become so alien that the Hebrew text was "corrected" in several cases to bring it into conformity with later Jewish theology

To learn a new language is not easy. For one thing, you will always speak with an accent. . . . But for your children it will be their native tongue!

One of the benefits the authors point out of discussing logical consequences with children rather than handing out arbitrary punishments is that the practice gives THEM the language to discuss One of the benefits the authors point out of discussing logical consequences with children rather than handing out arbitrary punishments is that the practice gives THEM the language to discuss seting boundaries and making decisions, even in conflicts with their friends.

You may be right in believing that if you study hard, one day you might become fluent in English. But you will still look Chinese, and when people meet you, they'll see a Chinese girl no matter how well you speak English. You'll always be expected to know Chinese, and if you don't, I'm afraid they will not respect you as much.

Thus it is written in the Talmud: "He who translates a passage as it seems to be, is a deceiver.