Quotes About Language

Emotions are the language of the soul. They are the cry that gives the heart a voice.

If the Germans still have a fatherland, it survives mostly in the mother tongue; and if it is true that land comes from our father and language from our mother, then our maternal heritage has proven the stronger

But in the meantime there's no reason to starve the users for [syntactic] sugar. It doesn't rot their teeth and it helps them avoid mistakes. — Brendan Eich

Seibel: One way to resolve that is the way Lisp does—make everything uniformly semiconcise. Where the uniformity has the advantage of allowing users of the language to easily add their own equally uniform, semiconcise, first-class syntactic extensions.

Something I worry about a lot when I write, that I'm less worried about with a computer, is about the ways in which English is ambiguous. I'm constantly worrying about ways in which the reader might misinterpret what I've written. So I've actually spent a lot of time consciously crafting the mechanics of my prose style to use constructions that are less likely to be misinterpreted.

I have this big allergy to ivory-tower design and design patterns. Peter Norvig, when he was at Harlequin, he did this paper about how design patterns are really just flaws in your programming language. Get a better programming language. He's absolutely right. Worshipping patterns and thinking about, "Oh, I'll use the X pattern.

when you're writing programs you need to be able to name your identifiers well. And your prose has to be good. I'd feel lost without a good dictionary.

Thompson: No, you get around that with idioms in the language. Some people write fragile code and some people write very structurally sound code, and this is a condition of people. I think in almost any language you can write fragile code. My definition of fragile code is, suppose you want to add a feature—good code, there's one place where you add that feature and it fits; fragile code, you've got to touch ten places.

Language systems stand on a tripod. There's the language, there's the libraries, and there are the tools. And how successful a language is depends on a complex interaction between those three things.

Seibel: Some people love Lisp syntax and some can't stand it. Why is that? Deutsch: Well, I can't speak for anyone else. But I can tell you why I don't want to work with Lisp syntax anymore. There are two reasons. Number one, and I alluded to this earlier, is that the older I've gotten, the more important it is to me that the density of information per square inch in front of my face is high. The density of information per square inch in infix languages is higher than in Lisp.

You have your words, and I have mine.

In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold standard of what things themselves communicate. Where randomness is disabled, authority should shine forth.

It is not an exaggeration to identify the flight of the radical left to 'antifascism' as the most successful maneuver of language politics in the twentieth century.

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.

sensibilización de minorías demasiado pequeñas y, más aún, como censura permanente a través de la policía lingüística inquisitiva.

contrast, ancient European access to the experiential world was preformed by grammatical dressage; in fact, in this literacy zone the actual intellectual material offered by the world was formatted according to letter, syllable, line, page, paragraph, and chapter.

As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly.

many such documents of the period, I can say it was written in the Latin of that period and not in more modern form.

Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.

Finally, for research like this, the quality of the translators is crucial. Kirundi is a language of allusion and proverbs: information is conveyed between the lines, hinted at, but rarely expressed directly. The challenge is also social: the translator is the front-line person who interacts with the interviewees, making the connection, maintaining the social aspects of the relation, putting people at ease.

You can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

You can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language .

Hell, Neil Gaiman took a classic that nine-year-old Peter Watts devoured without any trouble at all—Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book—and dumbed it down to an (admittedly award-winning) story about ghosts and vampires, aimed at an audience who might find a story about sapient wolves and tigers too challenging. It may only be a matter of time before Nineteen Eighty Four is reissued using only words from the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.

He's smarter than all of us put together, but sometimes he talks like he's got a fifty-word vocabulary." A soft snort. "It's not like it'd kill him to use an adverb once in a while.