Quotes About Language

Older acquirers progress more quickly in early stages because they obtain more comprehensible input, while younger acquirers do better in the long run because of their lower affective filters.

What immersion has taught us is that comprehensible subject-matter teaching is language teaching — the subject matter class is a language class if it is made comprehensible. In fact, the subject-matter class may even be better than the language class for language acquisition.

The central hypothesis of the theory is that language acquisition occurs in only one way: by understanding messages.

It's odd with people who are shy: they never quite learn how to speak, to feel at home with words in their mouths.

When he began to talk about Wyndham, it was almost with relief, as if his purpose in life was to tell that story over and over. To tell it until its last shard had been pulled from him. As he listened to himself, he realized that the story sounded practiced as it changed from event and recollection into language, as if each retelling were an attempt to scrub away the awfulness.

Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she'd been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

God knows nothing we don't know. We gave him every word he ever said.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

This went on for four hours. By Millie's count, four hours was enough time to kill twenty-seven prairie dogs. They might have a language of sorts, but they didn't use it to tell each other not to have a look-see at what all the commotion was topside.

Words are worms, can live in your head for years if you let them in.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

As a religion, bilingualism is the god that failed. It has led to no fairness, produced no unity, and cost Canadian taxpayers untold millions.

Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using the words "higher" and "lower." MARY MIDGLEY

Another study, in which participants were asked to determine whether or not a capital letter in a word was a vowel or consonant (jewEl, fAble, oRacle, breaTh) found that it strongly disrupted subsequent semantic processing of unconsciously encountered words. In other words, the ability to determine the meaning in words, at an unconscious level, was inhibited.

That we take plant words in through our nose or our skin or our eyes or our tongue instead of our ears does not make their language less subtle, or sophisticated, or less filled with meaning. As the soul of a human being can never be understood from its chemistry or grammar, so cannot plant purpose, intelligence, or soul. Plants are much more than the sum of their parts. And they have been talking to us a long time.

As Anthony Trewavas once put it, "The use of the term 'vegetable' to describe unthinking or brain-dead human beings perhaps indicates the general attitude [toward plants].

It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imaginations, we learned to talk.

And then there are the Germans. Do you know, they form words by just sticking them together, so that their word for 'Gatling gun' literally translates into 'mechanicaldeviceshootingwithoutcockingrifle?' The words get longer still. No word is too long for a German because it's quite impossible to bore a German. You cannot entertain a Norwegian, you cannot bore a German, and you cannot educate an American or a chimpanzee.

Additionally, he liked to make his readers smile. Still in the preface, he writes that he avoided "academic technicalia," to which he adds a footnote. The footnote reads: Semper ubi, sub ubi, which translated means, "Always where, under where." In English it sounds like, "Always wear underwear.

The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are.

Anthropologists who study the wretched consequence of conquest, language loss, and ethnic cleansing say that it only takes two generations of rupture to sever the chord binding people to their ancestors and their ability to be at Home.