Quotes About Language

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.

Everybody talks to me about 'P.M.s,'" complained Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn to Inspector Fox on Monday afternoon, "and I never know whether they mean post-mortem or Prime Minister. Really, it's very difficult when you happen to be involved with both.

Well, ain't you the clam's cuticle!" said Mr. Ogden.

The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.

It was the Germans who first spoke of the war as 'der Weltkrieg', the world war; the British preferred the 'European War' or, later, the 'Great War'.

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression Fuck off.'   

In all countries there was a torrent of what Paul Fussell has called 'high diction': a friend became a 'comrade', a horse became a 'steed', the enemy became the 'foe'.

Por la lengua, la religión, la tenencia de la tierra y la estructura social, Irlanda era otro mundo.

Imagine a World Without Writing What would it mean if nothing were written, if the pronouncement 'I give you my word' were sufficient as a contract, and if laws and liabilities were not codified as letters and words on a page? @poetswritersinc by Nicholas Delbanco

in Hebrew, where the word for "old," zaken, is an acronym formed from the expression, zeh kanah hokhmah, literally, "this one has acquired wisdom.

Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.

A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations.

The language history of the world shows more of the true impacts of past movements and changes of people, beyond the heraldic claims of their largely self-appointed leaders. They reveal a subtle interweave of cultural relations with power politics and economic expediency.

Latin could make no headway with the sophisticates of the eastern Mediterranean, who spoke Greek and Aramaic, but it was quickly embraced by the illiterate peoples of Gaul and Spain.

Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai;

As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.

In fact, in the Rig Veda there is one hymn that is an invocation of V?c, speech itself. Here are two of its verses:

Celts appear to have been literate only where they had neighbours who could teach them.

From the language point of view, the present population of the world is not six billion, but something over six thousand.

Languages make possible both the living of a common history, and also the telling of it.

Languages change, as they pass from the lips of one generation to the next, but there is nothing about this process of transmission which makes for decay or extinction. Like life itself, each new generation can receive the gift of its language afresh. And so it is that languages, unlike any of the people who speak them, need never grow infirm, or die. Every language has a chance of immortality, but this is not to say that it will survive for ever.

Akkadian, the language spoken by Sargon I, the first Assyrian king in 2300 BC, is a close relative of the Arabic spoken by his successor in this same land, Saddam Hussein, in AD 2000; another close relative, the Middle East's old lingua franca, Aramaic, bridges the gap between the decline of Akkadian around 600 BC and the onset of Arabic with the Muslims around AD 600. They are all sister languages within the very close Semitic family.

The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than of the merchant.

for all we know the origin may have been due to a genius like that of Sequoya, the illiterate Cherokee who in the nineteenth century AD took the fact of English literacy as a proof of concept, and proceeded then to develop a syllabary for his own language from first principles.