Quotes About Language

The Hopewell, too, built mounds, and like the Adena seem to have spoken an Algonkian language.

Sahagún is known as the first American anthropologist, for he labored for decades to understand the Indians he sought to convert. With other missionaries, he amassed an archive on the Mexica and their neighbors—dynastic histories, dictionaries of native languages, descriptions of customs, collections of poetry and drama, galleries of paintings and sculpture—unequaled by that on any other Indian group, even the Inka.

This last sentence is imprecise.

Almost everyone agreed that the new name was a big improvement, logically speaking. Unfortunately, nobody used it. Not for the first time in Native American history, the confusing, incorrect name prevailed.

glottochronology

I've often thought that the unit of measure that best suits prose is the human breath

I wish I could explain things better, to make you understand. But I can't. It's just too hard to find the right word.

Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, but no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.

Through his powers of intellect, articulate language has been evolved; and on this his wonderful advancement has mainly depended.

How a word more or less, an idea omitted or added, a syllable misplaced, can transform a whole sentence and make what was before harmless, really shocking!

My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don't know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up. For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.

Charles Harrington Elster

Whereas art critics are ready to accept-indeed are looking for-the new fabrication of a consistent visual language, architectural critics, like the general public, are much more conservative and unwilling to accept the introduction of new codes.

semiologists would agree is that one simply cannot speak of "meaning" as if it were one thing that we can all know or share. The concept meaning is multivalent, has many meanings itself…

the nausea due to misunderstanding a language, the fear due to unfamiliarity with a style, the conflict of generations, are all mild examples of sign shock.

Love has its own communication. It's the language of the heart, while it has never been transcribed, has no alphabet, and can't be heard or spoken by voice, it is used by every human on the planet. It is written on our souls, scripted by the finger of God, and we can hear, understand, and speak it with perfection long before we open our eyes for the first time.

when brought into contact with the empire, picked up all the vices of its decaying civilisation without losing those of his original barbarism. It is not without some reason that the doings of Gaiseric have left their mark on the history of language in the shape of the modern word ' Vandalism.

The number-shape duality in Greek numbers made it easy; after all, zero didn't

Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it's semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty

In our tongue we would say alfär.

Olga noticed Mirium looking at her blankly. 'Don't you pray?' she asked. 'Pray?' Mirium shook her head. 'I don't understand - ' 'Prayers! Oh, yes, I forgot. Didn't dear Roland say that on the other side everybody is pagan? You all worship some dead god on a stick, impaled or something disgusting, and pray in English,' she said with relish.

But you're more at home with SQL than socialization: Innuendo wasn't a language they taught in CS lab.

In case you're worried about BLUE HADES, Professoe O'Brien speaks the language and is qualified to Liase. She's also completed her certification fixation on combat epistemology and can operate as your staff philosopher, should circumstances require it.