Quotes About Language

Bad spellers of the world, untie!

Indeed, the Catholic Church insisted on maintaining Latin as the sole liturgical language until the twentieth century—even though the New Testament had originally been written in Greek.)

During the meeting in Delhi with Dirac on 12 January 1955, Nehru asked him if he had any recommendations for the future of the new republic of India. After his usual reflective pause, Dirac replied: 'A common language, preferably English. Peace with Pakistan. The metric system.

Language aren't created in a day; some have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years, and are still evolving. The user of any language must constantly invent to adapt to fresh circumstances, and when invention flags they must borrow.

if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

above all, simplify the French language and abolish irregular verbs – a measure that would have rescued countless schoolchildren from the despotism of pernickety pedagogues.

highly codified and formal foreign language known as French – a language which, according to many French-speakers, almost no one speaks correctly. In the land of a thousand tongues, monolingualism became the mark of the educated person.

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? ... It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life —of so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.

English is illogical in places. Trying to make it logical is a mistake. Instead, bend to it.

morphological

Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, "I am sad," or "I am happy". They understood what we English have long forgot. We're not our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes.

Graham spoke plainly and directly. Convinced that the average person had a working vocabulary of six hundred words, he made a point to stick with common words and short sentences. Though he never put it exactly this way, he instinctively grasped the import of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's recipe for rabbit stew: first "you have to catch the rabbit.

Francesca said, "But don't you see? We talk about God for the simple reason that we still want to. There's a deeply ingrained human compulsion to keep using that word, that concept – to keep honing it, rather than discarding it – despite the fact that it no longer means what it did five thousand years ago.

Okay. Exorcism time. Repeat after me: Uncle Sigmund, I renounce you as a charlatan, a bully, and a fabricator of data. A cor-rupter of language, a destroyer of lives

Spend your good words extravagantly. Sprinkle them generously into conversations.

I educated myself, discovered my gift for language, learned that the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.

There is no way to use non-Christian language and logic to arrive at Christian utterances, conclusions, and behavior.

The Balti had as many names for rock as the Inuit have for snow.

Mm-mm, no, thank you, no, I don't want an enchilaaadaaa. Nor do I want a burr-eye-to. Or a tay-co. Or any other bizarre, unneccessary vowel substitutions.

Punctuation is meant only to clarify. And fruit off with the little smiley faces.

Encyclopedia is a Latin term. It means "to paraphrase a term paper."

The basic elements of DNA—hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon—translate directly to key letters of the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets. In these languages, our genetic code spells the ancient name of God. The same name lives within all humans, regardless of their beliefs, actions, lifestyle, religion, or heritage. This relationship was described in sacred texts, such as the Hebrew Sepher Yetzirah, at least 1,000 years before modern science verified such connections.

Allander smiled. "Well, if he doesn't tell me nothing then he would, in fact, be telling me something. A double negative makes a positive. Your advice isn't concordant with your desires.