Quotes About Language

Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working

We did not, of course, speak Mandarin, but the question "What the hell do you think you're doing?" has a familiar ring in any language. The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselves defeated us. We settled instead for explaining, by means of elaborate mime and sign language, that we were barking mad. This worked. He accepted it, but then hung around in the background to watch us anyway.

If they don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term Future Perfect has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

What's this fish doing in my ear?" "It's translating for you. It's a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like.

It is a farewell gift from the dolphins," said Wonko in a low quiet voice, "the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating

nothing but a gnab gib.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up;

If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

Ru ... ra ... wah ... who? He finally managed to say and lapsed into a frantic kind of silence. He was feeling the effects of having not said anything to anybody for as long as he could remember.

Se gli umani non si esercitano in continuazione a parlare, il loro cervello rischia di mettersi a funzionare

If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up.

Let others choose the sons of mirth, To give a relish to their wine; I love the men of heavenly birth, Whose thoughts and language are divine.18

Deaf people occupy a unique position. They make up the only cultural group where cultural information and language has been predominantly passed down from child to child rather than from adult to child, and the only one in which the native language of the children is different from the language spoken by the parents.

Words could kill, sometimes, he thought then. Words could change everything. Lourdes

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church...

Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.

Speaking of the information superhighway, we have all given each other official permission to administer a beating to whoever uses that accursed term. We're so sick of it!

As we hoped, our kids began to learn Italian. One day Isaac sat down to dinner, looked at the plate of pasta we'd prepared, made a face, and said, "Che schifo!" a vulgar expression meaning "Gross!" We were so proud.

We didn't use food as a reward. As some previous ASL researchers did. Jennie's reward was making herself understood. That is, she was rewarded like a human child would be rewarded. We wanted to replicate the way a human child acquires language. You don't cram food into an infant every time she says something, now, do you? Of course not.