Quotes About Language

look at me,' said Fitz. 'You lost me somewhere around "substructive". Is that actually a word?

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Active, living speech is just such a gesture, a vocal gesticulation wherein the meaning is inseparable from the sound, the shape, and the rhythm of the words.

The Socratic-Platonic psychê, in other words, is none other than the literate intellect, that part of the self that is born and strengthened in relation to the written letters.

At the heart of any language, then, is the poetic productivity of expressive speech. A living language is continually being made and remade, woven out of the silence by those who speak.… And this silence is that of our wordless participations, of our perceptual immersion in the depths of an animate, expressive world.

These were the idiots shat out by West Point, turds in starched uniforms and glistening high-and-tight haircuts, shiny-foreheaded future corporate executives who used words like envisionment instead of vision.

Govor nam je potreban koliko i vazduh koji udišemo, jer se govorom osloba?amo pritiska nerealizovanih misli, pri?a i re?enica. ?utanje može da ubije - i onoga koji ?uti, kao i onoga koji sluša.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

His words were creating a bewildering maze of grammatically inappropriate junctures. It was the kind of maze where small, white mice died without ever finding the little lever.

For many Romans, civil war remained the war that dared not speak its name. The words bellum civile had to be weighed carefully and spoken sparingly, if ever at all, because of the harsh memories of major conflicts.

All writing is lies. Good writing is lies skillfully told.

Name calling may be acceptable in political circles but it has no place in the language of science, indeed what is happening in the annals of global warming smacks of Macarthyism complete with witch hunts.

The difference between a translation and an original is not of the same order as the difference between powdered and steamed coffee.

To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.

It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought. We should do more of it.

in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication—?and it was not written in English.

I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense.

Translation is another name for the human condition.

But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language to think with.

Translation is the opposite of empire

Would we have ever asked what it is that a translator 'carries across' the 'language barrier' if he or she were called a 'turner', 'tongue-man', or 'exchanger'? Probably not.

A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator's mission seem so impossible.