Quotes About Language

If God wrote the New Testament, he knew surprisingly little Greek.

What is the sign of every literary decadence ? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.

Language belongs in its origin to the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology: we find ourselves in the midst of a rude fetishism when we call to mind the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language – which is to say, of reason.

the bowels of existence do not speak unto man, except as man.

Reason in language- oh what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Our whole science is still, in spite of all its coldness, of all its freedom from passion, a dupe of the tricks of language, and has never succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious changeling "the subject" (the atom, to give another instance, is such a changeling, just as the Kantian "Thing-in-itself").

Our eyes find it easier on a given occasion to produce a picture already often produced, than to seize upon the divergence and novelty of an impression: the latter requires more force, more "morality." It is difficult and painful for the ear to listen to anything new; we hear strange music badly. When we hear another language spoken, we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds into words with which we are more familiar and conversant—

Enemy you shall say but not villain, sick you shall say but not wretch, fool you shall say but not sinner.

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

There is always a simple way of saying things, said Fafhrd ominously. But there is where I differ with you, returned the adept, almost animatedly. There are no ways of saying certain things, and others are so difficult that a man pines and dies before the right words are found. One must borrow phrases from the sky, words from beyond the stars. Else were all an ignorant, imprisoning mockery.

Quien miente con arte se acerca a la verdad más de lo que imagina.

No hay forma de expresar determinadas cuestiones, y otras son tan complejas que un hombre languidece y muere antes de encontrar las palabras adecuadas.

Learning another cuisine is like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about its most basic rules of grammar. You experience it as a flood of words, or dishes, without system or structure.

Think, for a moment, of the words we use to describe some of the textures most adored by Chinese gourmets: gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy, crunchy, gloopy. For Westerners they evoke disturbing thoughts of bodily emissions, used handkerchiefs, abattoirs, squashed amphibians, wet feet in wellington boots, or the flinching shock of fingering a slug when you are picking lettuce

university textbooks I'd encountered in my few weeks of class were deathly dull and totally impractical. Instead of introducing us to useful words like 'stir-fry' and 'braise', 'bamboo shoot' and 'quail', they had required us to learn by rote long lists of largely irrelevant Chinese characters:

Sichuanese dialect is like Mandarin put through a mangle. So the Mandarin 'sh' becomes 's', vowels are stretched out like warm toffee, there are pirate-like rolling 'r' sounds at the end of sentences, and no one can tell the difference between 'n' and 'l' or 'f' and 'h' (the province of Hunan, for example, is known in Sichuan, helpfully, as 'Fulan').

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

Physical experience is the translation of phenomena into symbolic language, and the law is the creation of the wind or a symbol.

The deletion of an apostrophe and a single letter turned "Jane's" into "Jane," and the words "and her" were inserted immediately thereafter. Now the crown was to pass not to the male heirs of Jane Grey but to "the Lady Jane and her heirs masles." (Edward was of course highly literate, but spelling was a kind of free-form creative art in the sixteenth century

I've got to jump in the shower." "I'll Uber home," I said. "Do you realize you just made a noun into an intransitive verb?" I wiped my mouth. "Story of my life," I said.

Il mondo era così recente, che molte cose erano prive di nome, e per citarle bisognava indicarle col dito.

Je lisais … comme toujours lorsqu'on est emporté par la magie d'une histoire bien racontée ou la simple ivresse de se reconnaître à travers des mots plus habiles que les siens.

To me, merely and pretty were words that had nothing to do with each other. Pretty went with miraculously, and merely belonged in another paragraph entirely.

The chief merit of language is clearness.