Quotes About Language

Astfel este magia vorbirilor omeneÅŸti, care prin înÅ£elegere omeneasc? însemneaz? adesea, cu sunete egale, lucruri deosebite.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

William snapped, 'Drop it; we're looking for a Greek book!' 'This?' I asked, showing him a work whose pages were covered with abstruse letters. And William said, 'No, that's Arabic, idiot! Bacon was right: the scholar's first duty is to learn languages!' 'But you don't know Arabic, either!' I replied, irked, to which William answered, 'At least I understand when it IS Arabic!

It would be atrocious," I said, "to kill a man in order to say bu-ba-baff!

Binele unei c?rÅ£i const? în a fi citit?. O carte este f?cut? din semne, care vorbesc de alte semne, carele, la rândul lor, vorbesc despre lucruri. F?r? un ochi care s? le citeasc?, o carte poart? semne care nu produc concepte, ÅŸi deci mut?.

Ya te he dicho que el límite entre el veneno y la medicina es bastante tenue, los griegos usaban la misma palabra, pharmacon, para referirse a los dos.

What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a 'final' meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach.

L'Ur- Fascismo parla la neolingua. [...] Tutti i testi scolastici nazisti o fascisti si basavano su un lessico povero e su una sintassi elementare, al fine di limitare gli strumenti per il ragionamento complesso e critico. Ma dobbiamo essere pronti a identificare altre forme di neolingua, anche quando prendono la forma innocente di un popolare talk-show.

Sin unos ojos que lo lean, un libro contiene signos que no producen conceptos. Y por tanto, es mudo.

Verba vana aut risui apta non loqui (????? ??????, ? ??? ????????? ?????, ?? ?? ????????).

Gott ist ein lautes Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier. Tanr? kocaman bir hiçtir, ne ÅŸimdi ilgilendirir onu ne de buras?.

He had been among diplomats enough to learn how they said something which seemed to mean something but didn't; how they put in weasel words which would sneak away with the substance of any sentence.

The reply was: "Whom shall I say, sir?"—in smart society the only persons who bother with grammar are the butler and the social secretary.

Believe it or not, in 1969 the French writer Georges Perec wrote a palindromic story that was 500 words long! The whole story reads the same backwards as forwards.

I would say to her, in that mixed river language we used, 'One day, Beth, somebody will snatch your case. It isn't safe to travel about with money like that.' 'The day that happens, Mis' Salim, I will know the time has come to stay home.' It was a strange way of thinking. But she was a strange woman.

The man from Beirut came in and watched. He stood beside Hans. Then he stood beside the furniture-maker and whispered to him in English, their secret language. 'The guy's locked himself in the cabin.

TWO TOPICS IN brain research always seem to attract geniuses and crackpots. One is consciousness and the other is the question of how language evolved.

Ngram Viewer charts provide excellent illustrations of long-term

A pun is its own reword.

What Mostovskoy found most sinister of all was that National Socialism seemed so at home in the camp: rather than peering haughtily at the common people through a monocle, it talked and joked in their own language. It was down-to-earth and plebeian. And it had an excellent knowledge of the mind, language and soul of those it deprived of freedom.

Nuestro honorable sargento dominaba todas las lenguas, excepto las extranjeras.

Dad made that up just like he made up the sign over the store. He plays with words until they say what he feels. I guess that makes him a poet.

Scrape the surface of language, and you will behold interstellar space and the skin that encloses it.

All language is metaphoric, and abstract concepts are always used by those in power to insure their supremacy. Everything is language, and the body is always a written, never a "natural" body.