Quotes About Language

These tribes differed little from one another, either in appearance or in language. They spoke different dialects, which they could all understand if they chose. But they very rarely did. For, as is often the case, these close-related, neighbouring tribes were unable to get on with one another. They spent all their time exchanging insults and ridicule, when actually they were jealous of each other.

One Egyptian word for sculptor was actually 'He-who-keeps-alive.

Never have a long conversation with anyone who says "between you and I.

For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or--to put the thing less cynically--we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. Phillip, at all events, lived more graciously in Italian, the very phrases of which entice one to be happy and kind.

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air.

They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.

Italian in the mouth of Italians is a deep-voiced stream, with unexpected cataracts and boulders to preserve it from monotony. In Mr. Eager's mouth it resembled nothing so much as an acid whistling fountain which played ever higher and higher, and quicker and quicker, and more and more shrilly, till abruptly it was turned off with a click.

You could call your cousin a shit if you liked, but not an eunuch. Rotten style!

You are not to say 'stink,' " interrupted Helen; "at least, you may say it, but you must pretend you are being funny while you say it.

One doesn't ask plain questions. There aren't such things.

They wished that they also knew Italian, for our phrases of approval and of amazement are so connected with little occasions that we fear to use them on great ones. We are obliged to become vaguely poetic, or to take refuge in Scriptural reminiscences.

She had learnt the lingo, but only to speak to her servants, so she knew none of the politer forms and of the verbs only the imperative mood.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be reguarded as a criminal offense.

All we're trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.

he dragged his words painfully from the poets

There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue...but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies, six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.

Dilini bilmedi?in bir yerde a?lamak fenad?r. Çünkü seni, senin dilinde susturacak kimse yoktur.

Alle 30 Jahre kippt die Sprache vollständig um. Die Kommunikation zwischen den Generationen wird dann unmöglich.

The Tower of Babel didn't work out well for anyone involved, but like the bulk of the Bible, that story was just a fairy tale, and a pretty boring one at that.

humor somehow comes through thanks to a gifted translator. Gianrico

It's not an exclamation point. There are no interjections in mathematics.

When I speak of Spanglish I'make talking about a fertile terrain for negotiating a new identity. I'make feeling excited, as Gloria Anzldua did in her book Borderlands/LA Frontera, about "participating in the creation of another culture/in a state of perpetual transition/with a tolerance for ambiguity.

The academic establishment. . . . argue over the diminution of Spanish because of the introduction of new Spanish words that are literally translations of England glish-- parquear, the park of "park," tales the plancelebratory of the more elegant estacionar which could be literally translated as "stationing.

To paraphrase a Latino saying (which is possibly ultimately from the Arabic traditiom), MI rasa is supposed raza." So Living in Spanglish is not a racial Istanbul text.