Quotes About Language

The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any wars, nor to have reduced the frequency with which wars have broken out, nor to have made the wars that have broken out less brutal. In fact, several murderous wars have been fought recently among people who speak 'the same language' in real terms.

It happens all too often - people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.

If two thousand five hundred languages are to be lost in the course of the twenty-first century, don't be in any doubt about what that means for us: in each of those two thousand five hundreds cases a culture will be lost.

Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovate in language is crucial to every scientific advance, to our intellectual curiosity, to our originality as human individuals, because it is crucial to our ability to communicate new ideas and discoveries.

On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.

he believed that all language, except for the most basic and elementary, was metaphorical, and even the highly desiccated metaphors are not verbal algebra.

Is there intelligence without life? Is there mind without communication? Is there language without living? Is there thought without experience?

You're communicating only if you're conveying information.

Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage. Because of this, they learn to love their teacher.

No one has ever asked them to translate a sentence from Carson McCullers (In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together) into German (In der Stadt gab es zwei Stumme, und sie waren immer zusammen) and pass it around the room, retranslating as they go, until it comes out as playground gibberish: In the bar there were two potatoes together, and they were trouble.

Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.

Ninety years old and chatttering, chattering away as if the cure for his inability to speak Japanese were the application of more Japanese.

The letter is in German; the university is under the impression Arthur Less is fluent in German, and Arthur Less's publisher, who recommended him, is also under this impression. So is Arthur Less. 'With God's happiness', he writes back, 'I accept the pedestal of power', and sends it off with a flush of pleasure.

The Internet, [Judy] Singer said, is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it. For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend.

It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.

All I know is what I have words for." The absence of words is the absence of intimacy; these experiences are starved for language.

Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent.

The difficulty of learning spoken English for a person profoundly deaf from an early age has been likened to a hearing American trying to learn spoken Japanese while locked within a soundproof glass cubicle.

Woody Allen once quipped that dwarf is once of the four funniest words in the English language. To be in your very essence perceived as comical is a significant burden.

writing fire and watching the syllables burn

For some odd reason, Compact Discs and Digital Video Discs are spelled as discs, not disks.

You know, Honora says, you read a word like massacre and you think, I know what that means. It means the slaughter of innocent people. And then you go on. You read another fact. You read the word trial. Or conviction. But then....when it happens to you, when you live the word, you realize that the word itself means nothing. It tells you nothing at all. It doesn't begin to convey the horror, does it?

Hey, he said. It's someday. He said the last word in Greek.

A pigeon is the same thing as a dove, did you know that? Bridget