Quotes About Language

The wheels of language run so smoothly that one rarely bothers to stop and think about all the resourcefulness and expertise that must have gone into making it tick. Language conceals its art.

how modern Hebrew has recently coined a rather recherché template, the passive of the reflexive ('he was made to snog himself'),

One example that can illustrate how deeply such conceptual mappings are engrained in both language and mind is the image 'more is up, less is down'.

As earl as the seventeenth century, John Locke recognized that in the realm of abstract notions each language is allowed to carve up its own concepts -- or "specific ideas" as he called them -- in its own way.

within two to three generations at least half the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared,

Subordination is a syntactic process that is often touted (by syntacticians, at least) as the jewel in the crown of language, and the best example for the ingenuity of its design: the ability to subsume a whole clause within another.

For just like the rainforests and the coral reefs, the languages of the world are vanishing. At an estimated death-rate of one language every two weeks, it seems that before this century is out, between half and three-quarters of the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, and among them almost all the languages of small preliterate societies.

The real differences between languages, he argued, are not in what a language is able to express but rather in "what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.

word that is not actively used by one generation will not be heard by the next generation and will then be lost forever.

without these much maligned forces of destruction, language would never have developed in the first place.

There are many languages that don't make a distinction between green and blue and treat these as shades of one color.

The parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.

Needless to say, genders cheer up the everyday life of ordinary mortals too.

Some languages, for example, have a gender distinction that is based only on "animacy," the distinction between animate beings (people and animals of both sexes) and inanimate things.

Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue.

According to some researchers, hominids prior to Homo sapiens could not, for instance, produce the vowel i {ee}. But ultimately, this does not say very much, since by all accounts, et es perfectle pesseble to have a thoroughle respectable language wethout the vowel i.

The German starts by claiming: 'German is off course ze best language. It is ze language off logik and philosophy, and can commuicate viz great clarity and precision even ze most complex ideas.' 'Boeff,' shrugs the Frenchman, 'but French, French, it ees ze language of lurve! In French, we can convey all ze subtletees of romance weez elegance and flair.

Another area where languages often display erratic behaviour is what linguists call 'gender',

reason is much more prosaic, and is simply that meta-phora is Greek for 'carry across' (meta = 'across', phor = 'carry'). Or to use the Latin equivalent, meta-phor just means trans-fer.

Linguistic "technology" in the form of sophisticate grammatical structures is not a prerogative of advanced civilization, but is found even in the languages of the most primitive hunter-gatherers. As the linguist Edward Sapir memorably put it in 1921, when it comes to the complexity of grammatical structures "Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam".

The conventional predictions are that within two to three generations at least half the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, especially those remote tribal tongues that are really different from what seems natural to us.

Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes.