Quotes About Language

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.

It never occurs to most of us .. that the question 'what is the truth' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the Law.

Moreover, something is or seems       That touches me with mystic gleams,       Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—      Of something felt, like something here;       Of something done, I know not where;       Such as no language may declare.[228]

I thought of a bad pun: "I'm going from bad to Hearst.

Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens— wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete. That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.

The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages.

Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means.

In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.

I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.

There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts.

That is not how it is for the Ariekei. Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.

Young mudlarks searching the river quag for scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or fade slowly to translucency and disappear.

If I program 'ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it," Scile said. "If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it's only sound, and that's not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.

In the beginning was each word of Language, sound isomorphic with some Real: not a thought, not really, only self-expressed worldness, speaking itself through the Ariekei. Language had always been redundant: it had only ever been the world. Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means." "Bullshit. It's cooperation.

I don't want to be a simile anymore," I said. "I want to be a metaphor.

He had since forever been working on a book called Uncanny Blossom. When Leon had told him, Billy had said, "I had no idea you were entering the Shit Title Olympics." "If you didn't swim in your sump of ignorance you'd know that title's designed to fuck with the French. Neither word's translatable into their ridiculous language.

Chaverim," he said to them. A category stolen from an old language. "Chaver," they said back—comrade, equal, conspirator.

Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador's Language.

Everything, though, depended on whether we could teach the Ariekei what we had to.

I still prefer 'pre-Cleavage' but it makes an unfortunate pun in English

His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a "y" to an "e" in a name for power, "sun-writing" becomes "light-drawing." The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.

The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. *There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time.* 'It'll be shortened with use,' Bren told me. 'Soon they'll be saying you're a girl ate what was given her.