Quotes About Language

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

I love the musicality of English. French sounds flat. In English, you can play with pitch.

My family are from Liverpool, so I have some twang there - I have a Midlands accent, and I was raised about an hour north of London, so my voice is a mess. Although, to American ears, it sounds like the crisp language of a queen's butler.

Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

I hate a word like 'pets': it sounds so much Like something with no living of its own.

In English, the sounds and melodies I created were an inspiration to me, and words came to me as I explored the sounds, and from there I was able expand on the meaning.

Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it.

I'm aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music - or lack thereof - in a particular accent.

I'm not a guy who curses very much in my personal life. When I curse it sounds like a kid trying to be cool. But I think there are quite a few people, my father being one of them, who use curse words rather eloquently.

As a society, we pick words that are offensive based on what we're most afraid of. We associate sounds with some dangerous idea, and right now the most dangerous thing to us are the differences between us.

I first started to sing when I started to talk. As soon as I could form words and sounds together, I was singing.

Describing certain sounds, there's a common language that guitar players have.

I feed on good soup, not beautiful language.

Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.

If my mom came to the sets, we would speak to her in Tulu, and no one would understand. That's an advantage when you know any South Indian language.

The problem in South is we don't have access to much of Hindi cinema.

There are many Bollywood actresses who work in the South and speak Tamil or Malayalam, and though it is correct, we find it funny sometimes.

Whether the film is a Hindi film or in a South Indian language, I don't think it matters.

In South Africa, we speak English and sometimes Afrikaans, sometimes Zulu, sometimes Xhosa.

North Korea and South Korea speak the same language, and actually, we are the same country.

I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.