Quotes About Language

the English of the nineteenth or early twentieth century is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today. The use of a noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable, and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation. My use of contemporary language—rather than the English of a generation or two ago—is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient.

THE FOLLOWING WORK was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. The style is the purest Italian.

A Hopi Indian named Sun Chief said: I had learned many English words and could recite part of the Ten Commandments. I knew how to sleep on a bad, pray to Jesus, comb my hair, eat with a knife and fork, and use a toilet. . . . I had also learned that a person thinks with his head instead of his heart.

And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.

We tried to educate ourselves. I would invite the girls to my rooms, and we took turns reading poetry in English to improve our understanding of the language. One of our favorites was Thomas Hood's Song of the Shirt, and another . . . Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mask of Anarchy. . . . Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Which in sleep had fallen on you- Ye are many, they are few!

to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.

Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?

My father was a schoolteacher once before he became an engineer and breac is a word, he explains, that the Irish people brought with them when they were crossing over into the English language. It means speckled, dappled, flecked, spotted, coloured. A trout is brack and so is a speckled horse. A barm brack is a loaf of bread with raisins in it and was borrowed from the Irish words bairín breac. So we are the speckled-Irish, the brack-Irish. Brack home-made Irish bread with German raisins.

We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don't just have one briefcase. We don't just have one language and one history.

dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.

You forget where you are," he said. "What right do you have to come here and cause trouble, and then tell us to speak your language?

Kill?' I realized I could never properly explain that word to this creature toiling here in its garden. Had it ever eaten meat? Could it conjugate the verb 'hunt?

Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception.

The Infinite discloses itself, as much of itself as our finite minds can comprehend, by building the universal grammars of language and religion into our brains. We did not create those grammars; they were bequeathed to us.

Most people inhabit a universe that is like French café au lait—fifty per cent skim milk and fifty per cent stale chicory, half psychophysical reality and half conventional verbiage.

Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite

Do you wish to speak in Provençal, French, or Latin? They are all I can manage, I'm afraid. Any will do, the rabbi replied in Provençal. Splendid. Latin it is, said Pope Clement.

People are so damn sensitive about colour around here that you can't even ask a barman for a jigger of rum. You have to ask for a jegro.

Pentecost] was not the reversal of Babel but its redemption.

When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word — the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.

No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.

This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue. ... So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision ... it already has the quality of an idea ... unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself.

Words, as I'm beginning to appreciate, can make things true.