Quotes About Language

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

All writing is filth

noscitur a sociis

that is not just a relative pronoun but also a stand-alone pronoun, a demonstrative adjective, and a conjunction.

It can convert nouns into verbs, and change a description of a panda bear ("Eats shoots and leaves") into a description of Jesse James ("Eats, shoots, and leaves"). No intelligent construction of a text can ignore its punctuation.

A traditional and hence anticipated rule of interpretation, no less than a traditional and hence anticipated meaning of a word, imparts meaning.

For example, post can refer to a piece of timber set upright, a position of employment, or mail.

But more often the language is not plain and unambiguous, so that to figure out its meaning, the implicit process of interpretation that we apply to plain and unambiguous language must be made express.

conveying two very different senses, as when table could refer either to a piece of furniture or to a numerical chart)

As Justinian's Digest put it: A verbis legis non est recedendum1 ("Do not depart from the words of the law").

fair reading": determining the application of a governing text to given facts on the basis of how a reasonable reader, fully competent in the language, would have understood the text at the time it was issued. The endeavor requires aptitude in language, sound judgment, the suppression of personal preferences regarding the outcome, and, with older texts, historical linguistic research.

British grammarian: "It is clearly desirable that an anaphoric (backward-looking) or cataphoric (forward-looking) pronoun should be placed as near as the construction allows to the noun or noun phrase to which it refers, and in such a manner that there is no risk of ambiguity.

the serial comma—that is, the comma after the penultimate item in a series and just before the conjunction (a, b, and c). Authorities on English usage overwhelmingly recommend using the serial comma to prevent ambiguities.

asyndeton (absence of conjunction) is normally equivalent to syndeton (use of the conjunction and).

The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.

You can not fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, either because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And, nonetheless, they have become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of.

What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.

Lo que dicen las palabras no dura. Duran las palabras. Porque las palabras son siempre las mismas y lo que dicen no es nunca lo mismo.

Only the wound speaks its own word.

Siz sözcükleri okumuyorsunuz ki efendim, onlar? yutuyorsunuz. Sözcüklerin tad?n? ç?karmak gerek. Ä°nsan?n aÄŸz?nda da??lmal?.

viaggi straordinari che non ha mai fatto, quelli che non potrà mai fare, che restano non scritti o chiusi in un loro segreto alfabeto sotto le palpebre, la sera, fino a quando arriva il sonno e si salpa

La voce umana è un arcobaleno: una sfumatura impercettibile e,dal verde,si passa al viola,al giallo, all'arancione. Ogni lingua umana possiede la sua peculiare intonazione per rendere le emozioni ...

I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.

A large vocabulary is like an artist having a big palette of colors. We don't have to use all the colors in a single painting, but it helps to be able to find just the right shade when we need it.