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"Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation."
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Exlpore more Language quotes
"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."
"Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet."
"Chameleonesque, hobbitish, unicorned, stompled, selfishism, and unwakeable may not be real words, but you do know what they mean."
"One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least."
"Where do the words gowhen we have said them?"
Explore more quotes by Kenneth L. Pike
"If the scholar feels that he must know everything about any topic, he is in trouble - and will not publish with a clear conscience."
"Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements."
"The view of the local scene through the eyes of a native participant in that scene is a different window."
"Christianity stands or falls as a living program, a way of life, made concrete in the life of man by the life of God through the life of the concretely living Christ."
"The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us."
"If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar."
"Identity in the form of continuity of personality is an extremely important characteristic of the individual."
"Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective."
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