Quotes About Language

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry.

My uncle said he used to start and end all his sentences with "motherfucker" because he learned his English from his black customers when he was a clothing wholesaler in New York.

They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.

But it would be wrong of me to say that we were all on equal footing, which is why I can't just write about my bad English next to your bad English. In my efforts to speak nearby, I also have to confront the distance between us, which is challenging because once I implicate myself, I can never implicate myself enough.

She talked about how the circuits of a poetic form are not charged on what you say, but what you hold back. The poem is a net that catches the stutters, the hesitations, rather

English is our ever-expanding neoliberal lingua franca, the consumer language of brand recognition and outsourced labor.

Overhaul the tired ethnic narratives that have automated our identities; that have made our lives palatable to a white audience but removed them from our own lived realities—and stop spelling ourselves out in the alphabet given to us.

It sounds like 'twee', but it's spelled T-H-U-Y.

The words of the Greeks are born on their lips, but those of the Romans in their hearts.

A $100,000,000 venture capital fund was set up solely for products using a specific computer language.

Hard to say the right thing, these days.

Australians say 'pissed off.' Pissed means drunk. Piss is alcohol. To take the piss--that means to send someone up, make fun of them.

We will need to give you a Muslim name…does Leila suit you?" "I don't deserve this kindness," she whispered. "That you, Muslims, should help a Jew—" "Come now!" Serif said, realizing that she was about to cry. "Jews and Muslims are cousins, the descendants of Abraham. Your new name, do you know it means 'evening' both in Arabic, the language of our Holy Koran, and also in Hebrew, the language of your Torah?

used personal and place-names in their transliteration

Most of the time, he found it hard to explain to his wife that his work as a sofer—a scribe of God's holy languages—made him rich, despite the very few maravedis it earned them. But as he looked at her, smiling slightly as she cleared the table, he was glad that for once she seemed to understand him.

I started with Arabic, the language of the Koran. Only one in five Muslims is an Arab; yet Arabic is the language in which the world's more than one billion Muslims—a fifth of the world's population—talk to God.

The nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was unobtainable. I found myself referring to two quite different English interpretations—George Sale's for a feel for the poetry of the work, and Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall's for a clearer sense of what the text actually said about sex and marriage, work and holy war.

When Titus speaks, I can hear every word. For me, that's like when the optician slides home the right lens and all the e's and g's and o's and c's become perfectly clear again and it isn't a struggle, even to read the bottom-most line...His voice touches places inside me like someone moving through a house, flicking light switches...No peering into corners for what's been said.

La pensée se glace en se traduisant en phrases.

But we do not yet have a computer and a program for it that together can interpret speech correctly, without uncertainties, when it is spoken at a normal rate.

In NEWSPEAK, words like honor, justice, morality, democracy, science, and religion are eliminated entirely, being replaced by a single new word, CRIMETHINK,

De toekomst blijft, dunkt mij, aan de figuratieve kunst, zoals ook in de literatuur de toekomst zal blijven aan het samenhangende verhaal met een begin en een einde -liefst met een conventionele interpunctie- en aan het samenhangende gedicht, beide tot stand gebracht in beheerst en bekwaam taalgebruik, en beide hoe geheimzinnig van inhoud ook, aan de oppervlakte een duidelijk herkenbare mededeling bevattend.

Zijn kennis van vreemde talen was nihil. Eigenlijk moest hij dood.