Quotes About Language

Drawing is to art as grammar is to language: you can speak without any knowledge of grammar, but do not expect to be understood, and certainly do not expect to become a poet.

That sent her friends to the dictionary, which gave her additional satisfaction. To dispatch one's friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one's own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it.

To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.

The Germans had a word for everything—a word that could be very focused, very specific, because it could be constructed for a precise set of circumstances. They even had a word, it was said, for the feeling of envy experienced when one sees the tasty dishes ordered by others in a restaurant and it is too late to change one's own order. Mahlneid, meal envy, she believed that was the word—if it existed at all.

An Englishman was reflecting on the different words that people use for fish. 'Isn't it strange,' he said, 'that the French say le poisson, the Spanish say el pescado, and the English call it fish—which is what it is.' 

I've never played,' said von Igelfeld. 'Nor I,' said Unterholzer. 'Chess, yes. Tennis no.' 'But that's no reason not to play,' von Igelfeld added quickly. 'Tennis, like any activity, can be mastered if one knows the principles behind it. In that respect it must be like language. The understanding of simple rules produces an understanding of a language. What could be simpler?

Miss Taylor smiled. "I shall assume that the verb in that sentence you've just uttered is implied, and that the phrase that you had in mind was That doesn't include…which would, of course, justify the use of the accusative me, rather than the nominative I. I assume that.

Unlearned language?" "There's a technical term for it," she said. "Xenoglossy. It's the ability to speak a language you've never learned. Some people appear to do so under hypnosis; they're put into a trance and they start talking as another personality. It's regression.

Mma Makutsi sighed. "You don't understand, Charlie. The word chairman covers both men and women." She paused. "Mind you, Mma Potokwane, many people these days just use the word chair. Perhaps you'd like—" She was not allowed to finish. "Certainly not, Mma," said Mma Potokwane. "I am not a chair—I am a person.

A noisy noise annoys an oyster. Or so the tongue twister would have us believe.

Metaphors were so bloody: people shot messengers, flogged dead horses, cut the throats of their competitors. Perhaps that was life; perhaps that was what it was really like.

Beaupré, in his native country, had been a hairdresser, then a soldier in Prussia, and then had come to Russia to be outchitel, without very well knowing the meaning of this word.3

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book? asked Mrs. Dodypol. It depends, says I, how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

The complexity of language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.

Blue-shirt ( Blauserk in Inuktitat, the Inuit language), or Mykla Jokull, now known as Gunnbjorn's Peak (12,500 feet)--the great metaphorical centerpiece in William T. Vollmann's saga-like novel The Ice-Shirt --is the great glacier in Greenland used as a landmark by Erik the Red in sailing west from Snaefellsness.

Words! They seemed his only experience, his only sophistications. And yet what were they? Merciless little creatures, crowding about and eager for command, each with its own physical character, an ancestry, an expectation of life and a hope of posterity.

it is called 'camel case' or 'intercapping' -- of writing small letters next to large in the same word, as in such popular significations as iPod, eBay, iTunes, etc. which few would argue is a distinct sign of illiteracy.

I did not say alas! (nobody ever does that I know of, though the word is so frequently written).

How poorly we communicate, even the most drastic messages, even to ourselves.

For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.

Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.

in prosperity prayers seem but a mere medley of words, until misfortune comes and the unhappy sufferer first understands the meaning of the sublime language in which he invokes the pity of heaven!

Love is the language that transcends all others.

Praying much in tongues is one way to develop an ear to hear the voice of the Lord. When we pray much in tongues we are allowing the Holy Ghost to speak through us.