Quotes About Language

Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past--it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases.

How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it, naming himself that, or maybe some other persons thought of it and named that person. It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.

I have only my intermittent life in your thoughts to live Which is like thinking in another language. Everything Depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.

Each moment / of utterance is the true one; likewise none is true.

Words are a mirror of their times. By looking at the areas in which the vocabulary of a language is expanding fastest in a given period, we can form a fairly accurate impression of the chief preoccupations of society at that time and the points at which the boundaries of human endeavour are being advanced.

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal

A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.

There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.

For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the feeling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.

Sayg?n bir yaÅŸam ve ölüm için, kavramlar kendi adlar?yla an?lmal?d?r.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

Nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel.

She wasn't sure what he meant by 'surquedry', other than probably meaning he thought she was a lippy bitch

Heil Hitler ," he said, which, he presumed, was another way of saying, "Well, goodbye for now, have a pleasant afternoon.

The joint realization that we live in a remarkable cosmic cocoon and can create languages and rocket ships in an otherwise apparently dumb universe ought to be transformative. Until we find other self-aware intelligences, we are how the universe thinks. We might as well start enjoying one another's company.

field linguists (they're like field biologists with really good microphones)

Symptoms are the body's mother tongue; signs are in a foreign language.

The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.

If the components of the body were organs and veins and cells, then the components of thought and language were words and grammar.

This is the nature of social existence. We talk in order to impose limits, to contain the world in a narrow frame.

Betrug und Schönheit der Sprache bestehen darin, dass sie das ganze Universum zu ordnen scheint und uns zu der Annahme verführt, wir lebten in Anbetracht eines rationalen Raumes, einer möglichen Harmonie. Doch da Wörter uns von der Gegenwart distanzieren, weshalb wir niemals ganz der Realität der Dinge habhaft werden, machen sie die Vergangenheit zur absoluten Fiktion.