Quotes About Language

By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.

As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again.

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.

A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store. Brevity is very important. If you're going to be longwinded, it should be for a purpose. Not just because you like your words.

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

I'm learning English at the moment. I can say 'Big Ben', 'Hello Rodney', 'Tower Bridge' and 'Loo'.

I do have a regard for the musicality of language that came from BBC sitcoms like 'Fawlty Towers.'

When I did my first Hindi film, 'Sargam,' I had to play a dumb girl. Critics went to town saying that since I was a south Indian and didn't know how to speak Hindi, producers of the movie decided to make me play dumb.

Learning English in Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns places the person ahead of the curve. I'm sorry to say but that's the reality.

The Vikings colonized Britain, and a lot of our modern day towns are named after Viking names that settled these big towns.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

If you're eight and you live in Los Angeles and everybody has toys and you go to a country that has a Marxist dictatorship and there are no toy stores and nobody speaks English and it's blazing hot every day and they only have fish, which you don't like, then you tend not to appreciate the cultural lessons you're learning.

People say there's no trace of an accent anymore, and there isn't because I worked very hard to lose it. And the reason I did that is a British accent in America is a real status symbol.

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.

The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having ever been in public use under the Arsacids.

Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.

Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.

If you track something like a political campaign and parcel out what's being communicated in a literal and narrative sense, and what's being communicated by means of emotional and symbolic language, you might find that it's the latter elements that absolutely dominate and move people. It makes me want to take that language and expose it.

The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get.

Music has no language. That's something I've come to believe in even more ever since 'Kolaveri Di' happened. I don't deliberately make separate Tamil, Hindi, or Telugu tracks.