Quotes About Language

Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,He moot reherce as ny as evere he kanEverich a word, if it be in his charge,Al speke he never so rudeliche and large,Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes new.

And once he had got really drunk on wine, Then he would speak no language but Latin.

Dig -- the mostly uncouth -- language of grace.

Even now, I tell myself, there is a language / to which I might speak and which / would rightly hear me...

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205)

Julian Huxley brought several other new words and concepts into biology, including replacing the much-maligned term race with the phrase ethnic group.

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

Sometimes english masters make you read poems chiz chiz chiz. You have to sa the weedy words and speke them beatifully as if you knew what they meant. Fotherington-tomas thinks this is absolutely super and when he sa he wander lonely as a cloud you think he will flote out of the window.

All skools make some sort of show at teaching the pupils things and the headmaster pin up a huge timetable of lessons etc which make the heart sink when you look at it. I mean do the grate british nation understand that thousands of its young elizabethans are looking at latin ugh before their breakfast hav even settled. I mean to sa how would they like saing mnerer moneraris moneretur etc at that hour eh?

I shouldn't need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn't think to stop it?

Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased —facts the new trues.

We've spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that's precisely how we did it —by making it lower case.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written

En la naturaleza no hay palabras, solamente iniciales. Al releer las nuevas "palabras", descubrimos que no son sino iniciales de otras

Man findet Spuren aller Wissenschaften in den Sprachen, und umgekehrt vieles in den Sprachen das in den Wissenschaften nützen kann.

Las reglas de la gramática son meras convenciones humanas; por eso cuando el diablo se le aparece a los poseídos habla un mal latín.

Cuando se empieza a ver todo en todo, la manera de expresarse suele volverse más oscura. Se empieza a hablar con lengua de ángel […].

Si un ángel nos hablara de su filosofía, creo que algunas frases muy bien podrían sonar como "2 por 2 son 13".

Um eine fremde Sprache recht gut sprechen zu lernen, und würklich in Gesellschaft zu sprechen mit dem eigentlichen Akzent des Volks, muß man nicht allein Gedächtnis und Ohr haben, sondern auch in gewissem Grad ein kleiner Geek sein.

Je mehr man in einer Sprache durch Vernunft unterscheiden lernt, desto schwerer wird einem das Sprechen derselben. Im Fertig-Sprechen ist viel Instinktmäßiges, durch Vernunft läßt es sich nicht erreichen.

Populairer Vortrag heißt heutzutage nur zu oft der, wodurch die Menge in den Stand gesetzt wird, von etwas zu sprechen, ohne es zu verstehen.

Every communication is rhetorical because it uses some technique to affect the beliefs, actions, or emotions of an audience.