Quotes About Language

If you can't write your message in a sentence, you can't say it in an hour. – Dianna Booher

My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language--you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing--and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.

Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you.

This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.

Guard your speech. Never speak of yourself, your affairs, or of anything else in a discouraged or discouraging way.

Fuck you, I said. Uh-oh. There's that angry word.

You know what 'Dolores' means? It's Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?

there was no shorthand for I'm sorry. You were obliged to speak those two words.

La lingua non ha ossa, ma rompe il dorsol... The tongue has no bones but can break a man's back!

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

The words of my book are nothing, the drift of it everything.

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.

Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently chrystallize.

Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences, It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes; It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music.

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach, with the twirl of my tongue I encompass words and volumes of words

Every existence has its idiom, every thing and idiom and tongue.

he can make every word he speaks draw blood

A leitura está cheia de aromas.»

Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.

A real translation is transparent.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

meaning is never found in relative independence, as in individual words or sentences; rather, it is in a constant state of flux –

Inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content.

The language of nature is comparable to a secret password that each sentry passes to the next in his own language, but the meaning of the password is the sentry's language itself.