Quotes About Language

De dónde provienen las palabras, que mi mano conoce y yo ignoro?

The Ottoman makeup was a unique assemblage of different elements and peoples: Turkish tribalism, Sunni Islam, Persian court practices, Byzantine administration, taxation, and ceremonial, and a high-flown court language that combined Turkish structure with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It had an identity all of its own.

Brahmi seems to have been adapted from a Semitic writing system .. Brahmi is the ancestor of most of the writing systems used in India.

Akkadian loanwords are completely assimilated to Aramaic, both phonologically and morphologically.

Proto Indo European!

At the end of the day, some authors will endure and most, including some very good ones, will not. Why do I think reading is important? It is such an effective medium between mind and mind. We think largely in words. A medium made only of words doesn't impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication. That's how you get pregnant. May you always be so.

The Chinese character for "crisis," he pointed out to me, combines the characters for "danger" and "opportunity.

You can overintellectualize these Greek letters," Pflug reflected, referring to the alphas, betas, and gammas in the option trader's argot. "One Greek word that ought to be in there is hubris.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.

Words do not reflect the world, not because there is no world, but because words are not mirrors.

Not now John, we've gotta get on. S'cusi dove il bar? Gotta get on. ?? ????????, ??? ????? ?? ????? Not now John, we've gotta get on. S'il vous plait ou est le bar? Gotta get on, gotta get on. Oy, where's the fucking bar John! Not now John, we've gotta get on. Gotta get on, gotta get on. Hammer! Hammer! Hammer! Hammer! Hammer!

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little.

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters.

The Text is not a definitive object.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize "that something is wrong with me". I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult...

Isn't the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more 'I love you's.

spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.