Language Quotes

It was the French of the Normans that, grafting itself onto the barbaric Saxon tongue, gave it its most magnificent blossoming. And, in these new countries, where both English and French are intertwined again, it is as if English were bathing itself in the fountain of its own youth, and as if French were remembering the buried treasures it had thought forgotten.

~ Jean-Christophe Valtat

The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

~ Italo Calvino

The authors disclose that in less than a century the word tension grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.

~ Philip Zaleski

The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.

~ Steven Pinker

Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The constructions and the different endings are not easy to master, especially if you are an English speaker.

~ John Mole

Astronomy is not the science of all objects with mass and weight and velocity. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Biology is not the science of all objects that consume and excrete and have inherited characteristics. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Linguistics is not the study of all possible symbols or symbol systems. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies.

~ Randy Allen Harris

For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.

~ John Mole

Lewis is like a gateway, making the riches of Deep Church more accessible.

~ Alister E. Mcgrath

Many people just think they understand English, remember.

~ Emma Wagner

And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-faddle and not faddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-pong and pitter-patter rather than pong-ping and patter-pitter? Why dribs and drabs, rather than vice versa? Why can't a kitchen be span and spic? Whence riff-raff, mish-mash, flim-flam, chit-chat, tit for tat, knick-knack, zig-zag, sing-song, ding-dong, King Kong, criss-cross, shilly-shally, see-saw, hee-haw, flip-flop, hippity-hop, tick-tock, tic-tac-toe, eeny-meeny-miney-moe, bric-a-brac, clickety-clack, hickory-dickory-dock, kit and kaboodle, and bibbity-bobbity-boo? The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back.

~ Steven Pinker

He said it twice because he had never said it before, and it sounded funny.

~ A.a. Milne

Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (...) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.

~ Robert Macfarlane

The limits of your language are the limits of your world.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

~ Walt Whitman

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

~ Aldous Huxley

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Film does not replace language, for it cannot exist without it. Film displaces language, exposes the abyss that threatens to engulf every semantic signification. Film parasitizes language, much as the animal does, drawing into its imaginary panorama that which remains undisclosed in discursivity. Cinema is a parasite.

~ Akira Mizuta Lippit

A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term we or us without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that we are all agreed on our interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics (our sensibilities are enraged...) Always ask who this we is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron Maulana Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called US. Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was Wherever US is, We are. It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.

~ Christopher Hitchens

He spoke Spanish, English, Italian, and just enough of every other language to be able to charm women around the world.

~ Lynsey Addario

The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and spluttering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can't understand the actual words, but we sense the contempt. You get used to contempt. After a while the commands just sound like a constant clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus. Trudi Pelikan said: Russian is a language that's caught a cold.

~ Herta Müller

Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.

~ Anne Enright

Language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view.

~ Neil Postman

Fire and water and smoke and incense and chanting and bells and butter and blood: this was a language whose syllables were translated into physical terms, a language of the elements. It was a language that he hoped might speak to him one day.

~ Damon Galgut

When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

~ Steven Pinker

The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.

~ William S. Burroughs

remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world

~ Joseph Fink

... as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to 'metal objects designed to cause harm'.

~ Austin Grossman

The English language is simply not logical. It is strong, free, and beautiful.

~ Edward Nelson Teall

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be we.

~ Andrew Smith

I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.

~ William H. Gass

It is noteworthy, the researcher further argued, that the inscription on the sword was engraved in the Romanian language, and, consequently, we see that Latin was actually Romanian, and not the invented language that for many centuries has passed for ancient Latin.

~ Vladimir Lorchenkov

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.

~ Mary Norris

Since God doesn't have a name, I'll give him the name of Simptar. It doesn't come from any language. I give myself the name Amptala. As far as I know no such name exists. Perhaps in a language earlier than Sanskrit, an it-language.

~ Clarice Lispector

I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow.

~ Terry Pratchett

Student-people are different from other people. They spend their entire life asking questions, and as soon as they have found out the answers, they start all over again with new, harder questions... when a student-person finds a good answer to a hard question, the other student-people will gasp, hug each other, and then throw a party. Those parties never last long, for student-people are in a hurry to go back to work and find new answers.

~ Roberto Trotta

...it always felt good to have that moment of resolve, like saying, I'm gonna learn French! It doesn't matter if you do it or not, deciding is the high, right?

~ Felicia Day

Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.

~ Samuel R. Delany

Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.

~ David Hume

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

~ Alexander Chee