Quotes About Language

All writing is a sin against speechlessness,' Beckett had said. He would have stopped, I thought, if he could.

Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books.

Speaking in Irish he explained that while he would like to deliver his speech in Irish he did not have enough command of the tongue to express himself properly and therefore he was going to continue in English. However when he spoke in English it was to begin by saying: 'Some of the members do not know Irish, I think, and consequently what I shall say will be in English.

Puns are the E. coli of humor,

Marla cursed--though her profanities we less destructive than Rondeau's, they were more heartfelt.

Words are instruments, they are tools that, in their different ways, are as effective as any sharp edge or violate chemical. They are, like coins, items of great value, but they represent a currency that, well spent, returns ever greater riches.

Not only does language reflect a person's thinking, but it also reinforces a person's thinking.

People ask 'do you make a conscious effort not to swear?' - if you're doing silly stuff you're not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood, who were funny without swearing, were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway.

Galm's tone was reserved, each of his words precisely enunciated, almost as if it required extra concentration for him to speak. He was thousands of years old, and I wondered if he was so ancient and powerful that he sometimes had difficulty remembering simple things, like how to use language.

At the root of this failure of intelligence was "our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language," he said.

When we said we were going to do something "directly," which is pronounced "dreckly," we meant that we were going to get to it sooner or later, one of these days, maybe never, and please don't ask again.

by 1900, the tribes owned less than 2 percent of the land they once possessed. Entire languages had already disappeared—more than a loss of words, a loss of a way to look at the world.

Sports just happen to be excellent for avoiding foreign-language stage fright and developing lasting friendships while still sounding like Tarzan.

Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.

One evening, intending to ask my host mother to wake me the next morning (okosu), I ask her to violently rape me (okasu). She is very confused.

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages. —DAVE BARRY

18. Notice how I take "you" out of the sentence to avoid finger-pointing, even though it's implicit. "Normally, you make priorities clear" sounds like a backhanded insult. If this is a significant other, you can skip this formality, but never use "you always do X," which is just a fight starter.

Esto se hace para que «no vuelvas a [las viejas creencias] a través de viejas fórmulas lingüísticas

Language learning deserves special mention. It is, bar none, the best thing you can do to hone clear thinking.

Ludwig Wittgenstein,

often in people's 30s or 40s, a stage where you begin crafting your own language for what you do as an increasingly "strong poet"—you make your craft your own and view your life as more self-expression than simply playing out other people's roles for you.

you never want to solve a research problem with language. You

In reality, most people aren't "bad" at languages. They're bad, like me, at memorizing boring, zero-gratification tables that make DMV forms look sexy.

If you learn the auxiliary verbs in your target language, plus the all-important to be, to have, to do, and to go, you can very quickly express any idea.18 Just see the following chart.