Quotes About Language

another arabic curse that cracks me up is the one my parents use whenever they go aggro at me. Instead of cursing me, they curse themselves! When Dad yells out "God damn your father" I'm absolutely chicken pox itching to tell him that he really is missing the point.

language is no deus ex machina to account for philosophy.

Oh, Tatyana, The Angel comes: better to squawk like a chicken Than to say with truth, "But I'm a good girl," And Meet his Challenge with a last firm strange Uncomprehending smile; and—then, then!—see The blind date that has stood you up: your life. (For all this, if it isn't, perhaps, life, Has yet, at least, a language of its own Different from the books'; worse than the books'.) And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.

The semicolon is a much neglected beast

The devil white man cut these black people off from all knowledge of their own kind, and cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth's only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge of his true identity.–The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Strong selection for extreme mental capacities may have given us all minds like the legs of racehorses, fast but vulnerable to catastrophic failures. This model fits well with the idea that schizophrenia is intimately related to language and cognitive ability.93 It also fits well with the observation that schizophrenia may be intimately related to the human capacity for "theory of mind," our ability to intuit other people's motives and cognitive abilities in general.

Noam Chomsky, in particular, says flatly and often that he has very little concern for language in and of itself; never has, never will. His driving concern is with mental structure, and language is the most revealing tool he has for getting at the mind. Most linguists these days follow Chomsky's lead here.

Language was just that thing that happened when you opened your mouth at the table, squeezed a few noises out of your vocal chords, and induced Socrates thereby to pass the salt.

Nor does linguistics need the nominal blessing of science. It is some sort of systematic, truth-seeking, knowledge-making enterprise, and as long as it brings home the epistemic bacon by turning up results about language, the label isn't terribly important. Etymology is helpful in this regard: science is a descendant of a Latin word for knowledge, and it is only the knowledge that matters.

I will believe in students' competence and intelligence. I will keep faith...that they have stories to tell, things to explain, and the language with which to do those things. I will reject any notion that places in my mind a belief in students' deficits -- whether those deficits be genetic, cultural, or behavioral. I will treat them as people who can get important things done for important reasons.

Smell and taste are processed in parts of our brains that are reactive and emotional rather than intellectual, which is one reason developing a good vocabulary of aromas is so difficult. It's a long journey from our lizard brain way up to where language is processed.

In fact, growing up, I thought there were two types of families: 1) Those who need a dictionary to get through dinner. 2) Those who don't. We were no. 1. Most every night, we'd end up consulting the dictionary, which we kept on a shelf just six steps from the table. "If you have a question," my folks would say, "then find the answer.

Must the howling Demos devour everything gentle in the land, and reduce us all to the common level of the pot-house politician, and compel us to use his slang? Radicalism seemed to be now, just what it had been in the great French Revolution, a sort of mad-dog virus; every one who was inoculated with it, becoming rabid.

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts…. If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. —GEORGE ORWELL, "POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE," 1946

Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.

What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

Our first invention was the story.

If understanding language and other phenomena through statistical analysis does not count as true understanding, then humans have no understanding either.

Necesario siempre me ha parecido una palabra exagerada

Wittgenstein dislikes all ornamentation that is not part of the construction, and never find anything simple enough.

Wittgenstein's language has the singularly rare quality of being both colloquial and painstakingly precise.

Logic is not a science that discovers truths; it is just a collection of tautologies.

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.