Quotes About Language

Don't lecture me in my own field! We've got language and speech centers hardwired into our brains. That gives us a common starting point. Gels don't have anything like that. Speech might just be one giant conditioned reflex to them.

no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language.

I mean, Mom would never admit it in a million years but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It's limiting. Maybe whatever's out here doesn't even use it.

How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war?

Phaistos Disk.

Linguists don't use it?" I knew some that did. "We don't." And the others are hacks. "Thing about game theory is, it assumes rational self-interest among the players. And people just aren't rational.

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?

but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

I believe that architecture today needs to reflect on the task and possibilities which are inherently its own. Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings, and speak its own language.

Alakalar?m?z?n yüz bin ?ekline isim bulam?yoruz ve "sevmek" deyip ç?k?yoruz. Onun için ne kadar suistimale u?ruyor bu kelime.

Kime yaranmak olursa olsun, güzel Türkçe dururken, sokak levhalar?na, tabelâlara Frans?zca ibareler yaz?lmas?na aleyhtar oldu?umu söyledim.

I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.

Of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren't spoken by the children. In one generation, we're going to halve our cultural diversity.

derives from the 14th-century word Old French aleurer, to attract, captivate, and more exotically, to train a falcon to hunt. The roots are à, to, and loirre, falconer's lure.

Writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.

I've always had trouble with the subjunctive. I wish that were not the case.

Sports is like rock 'n' roll, both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.

In quantum theory, words are blunt tools.

In his famous essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell concluded with six emphatic rules, including "never use a long word where a short one will do" and "never use the passive where you can use the active." But the sixth rule was the key: "Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what's happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out. People have invented a 'soft language' to insulate themselves from the truth, he said, 'toilet paper became bathroom tissue … The [garbage] dump became a landfill … Partly cloudy became partly sunny.

These days, it literally is all about 'me'. In an analysis of over 750,000 books published between 1960 and 2008, Jean Twenge and her colleagues found that the use of first person plural pronouns (i.e. We, Us) decreased 10 per cent, while during this same timeframe, the use of first person singular pronouns (i.e. I, Me) increased 42 per cent, and second person pronouns (i.e. You, Your) quadrupled.

Of course even as Ave Bury, the "Ave" reverts back to the root of "Eve" which I know means "female serpent.

The point was that the world of music—its language, beauty, and mystery—was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun. Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The "out there" stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.