Quotes About Language

Phoenician writing is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite system, and from these developed the Palaeo-Hebrew script (c. 800 BCE) and the Aramaic script (c. 700 BCE), which was adopted by Hebrew after Babylonian exile.

The earliest Hebrew texts that have reached us date from the end of the second millennium BCE.

The Israelite tribes that settled in Canaan from the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BCE, regardless of what their language might have been before they established themselves there, used Hebrew as a spoken and literary language until the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE.

The exile marks the disappearance of this language (i.e., Biblical Hebrew) from everyday life and its subsequent use for literary and liturgical purposes only during the Second Temple period.

Archaic Hebrew ... earliest inscriptions dating as far back as the close of the second millennium BCE.

The language of archaic biblical poetry has obvious connexions with the poetry of the Canaanite north.

Archaic Hebrew ... no general agreement among scholars regarding this term.

The formation of a unified standard (biblical) text probably also involved the elimination of terms and structures that were too archaic to be understood so many centuries after the material had first been composed.

Biblical Hebrew is not a language in the full sense of the word but merely a 'fragment of language'.

There have been various attempts to reconstruct the vocalization and pronunciation of classical biblical Hebrew, which certainly differs considerably from that established by the Masoretes fifteen centuries later.

Hebrew ... belongs to the Canaanite group of languages ... this means that when the Israelite tribes settled in Canaan they adopted the language of that country, at least for their written documents. Ancient traditions ... allude to Aramean ancestors (see Dt 26:5).

Various attempts have been made, with differing degrees of success, to reconstruct pre-exilic Hebrew, including its morphology.

In the passage where Jacob and his descendants ... final break from Laban (Gn 31:47), various writers have seen an allusion to the time when Israelites abandoned Aramaic and adopted the Canaanite language of the country they were living in.

Some of the more outstanding features of Ugaritic are its preservation of most of the Proto-Semitic consonantal phonemes.

The number of vowel phonemes varies according to the different Masoretic traditions.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.

Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone.

all cats have a Spanish tinge although Puss himself elegantly lubricates his virile, muscular, native Bergamasque with French, since that is the only language in which you can purr.

The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth.

They were dirty and common. She hated to use the word "common", only common people called other people "common"; her mother taught her that.

Briefer is better, so learn to write tight

Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect." "Yes, it is. But it is politically correct." (The Rise of Political Correctness)

The point of Political Correctness is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself. (The Rise of Political Correctness)