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Exlpore more Language quotes
"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."
"Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape."
"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love."
"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."
"Why people use "Was" I have heard some people to say "I was a smart kid at school - Eminem", but why "Was", was is a word for describing the past... which will mean that has started and ended... so what??? How to get it now? You aren't wise, are you?"
"He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out."
"Words are the fallen ruins of silent majesty."
"Kitai blinked slowly. "Why would you use the same word for these things? That is ridiculous.""We have a lot of words like that," Tavi said. "They can mean more than one thing.""That is stupid," Kitai said. "It is difficult enough to communicate without making it more complicated with words that mean more than one thing."
Explore more quotes by Roman Jakobson
"Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language."
"It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no classification."
"A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography."
"Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language."
"The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features."
"The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning."
"Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components."
"For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc."
"In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified."
"Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve."
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