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Quotes About Languages

Those religions arose among peoples speaking three closely related languages, termed Semitic languages: Aramaic (the language of Christ and the Apostles), Hebrew, and Arabic, respectively.
~ Jared Diamond
New Guinea, though it accounts for only a small fraction of the world's land area, encompasses a disproportionate fraction of its human diversity. Of the modern world's 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.
~ Jared Diamond
Taiwan is the homeland where Austronesian languages have been spoken for the most millennia and have consequently had the longest time in which to diverge. All other Austronesian languages, from those on Madagascar to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population expansion out of Taiwan.
~ Jared Diamond
Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.
~ Jared Diamond
It turns out that, in addition to China's eight 'big' languages—Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often referred to collectively simply as 'Chinese'), with between 11 million and 800 million speakers each—China also has over 130 'little' languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers.
~ Jared Diamond
It's the exclusive home of 1,000 of the world's approximately 7,000 languages. It holds the largest number of societies that even in modern times still lay beyond the control of state government or were only recently influenced by state government. Its populations span a range of traditional lifestyles, from nomadic hunter-gatherers, seafarers, and lowland sago specialists to settled Highland farmers, composing groups ranging from a few dozen to 200,000 people.
~ Jared Diamond
Art according to art! Love according to love! This is taking the salt away from Heaven. Do you think Our Savior tries to make Himself talked about? He does not ask to be recopied. God cannot be deified without ridicule. He likes to be lived. Dead languages are dead. One must translate Him into all the living languages, and help Him to hide Himself to do good just as the Devil hides himself to do evil.
~ Jean Cocteau
If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work.
~ Unknown
Of course I catch up on the odd Malayalam and Tamil movie on streaming platforms once a while.
~ P. R. Sreejesh
Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.
~ Niklaus Wirth
it has now been translated into three languages. For the most part, this has
~ Unknown
Programmers tend to be divided into tribes by the languages they use. More even than by the kinds of programs they write.
~ Paul Graham
And the reason everyone doesn't use Listp is that programming languages are not merely technologies, but habits of mind as well, and nothing changes slower.
~ Paul Graham
If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that probably doesn't make A more powerful, because you can probably write a subroutine to do it in B. But if A supports, say, recursion, and B doesn't, that's not likely to be something you can fix by writing library functions.
~ Paul Graham
I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots.
~ Paul Graham
Number 1, languages vary in power. Number 2, most managers deliberately ignore this. Between them, these two facts are literally a recipe for making money. ITA is an example of this recipe in action. If you want to win in a software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find, use the most powerful language you can get, and wait for your competitors' pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean.
~ Paul Graham
Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.
~ Ken Robinson
They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
~ William Shakespeare
a novel which I called Pornografia. At that time it wasn't such a bad title, today, in view of the excess of pornography, it sounds banal, and in a few languages it was changed to Seduction.
~ Witold Gombrowicz
I am a seasoned field surgeon having survived some five hundred campaigns,' said Siri. 'I was educated in France and I speak three languages.' 'Four if you include double-Dutch,' said Civilai.
~ Unknown
We invented a whole new class of computer programming languages known as list processing languages. The basic idea is that whenever a piece of information is stored in memory, additional information should be stored with it telling where to find the next associated piece of information.
~ Herbert A. Simon
Aidan pulled against his bonds. "They keep talking to him in a whole bunch of languages. A lot of French. Something about the Thorn of Istra. I think he's in trouble." "Are you?" Tana asked. "Not exactly," said Gavriel.
~ Holly Black
Business and financial interests were no more unified or consistent than the social movements, but their activities forged languages and concepts, practices and policies, and founded new institutions to promote mechanisms that either shored up or established inequalities of power, rank, wealth, or cultural status.
~ Unknown
I have been acting for more than 25 years and have worked in all the four Southern languages. But it is in the Kannada films that I got huge recognition and variety of roles.
~ Suhasini Maniratnam