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Language Quotes
"A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state."
22
"The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation."
22
"When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it."
22
"How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem."
22
"I think maybe the English don't want to try something and look stupid, because they are a bit reserved."
21
"Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore."
21
"Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?"
21
"When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware."
21
"The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language."
21
"Those were the days, you know. It's an English thing; as soon as it's gets to 6 pm, you have to go and have a drink. We used to stick to that religiously."
21
"It was all completely incomprehensible to me. I was fearful of the language. You had to look up every third word."
21
"To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery."
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"That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way."
21
"The English had hit upon a splendid joke. They intended to catch me or to bring me down."
21
"But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too."
21
"Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek."
20
"I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn."
20
"Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved."
20
"A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same dog he was before? No sir; he is das Hundes; put him in the Dative case & what is he? Why, he is dem Hund. Now you snatch him into the accusative case & how is it with him? Why he is den Hunden? ... Read moreBut suppose he happens to be twins & you have to pluralize him, what then? Why sir they'll swap that twin dog around thro' the four cases till he'll think he's an entire International Dog Show all in his own person. I don't like dogs, but I wouldn't treat a dog like that. I wouldn't even treat a borrowed dog that way."
20
"Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar."
20
"'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word."
20
"Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past."
20
"The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences."
20
"Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds."
20
"Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy."
20
"Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple."
20
"French is, in many ways, more difficult for an English-speaking person to sing. It is so full of complex and trying vowels. It requires the utmost subtlety."
20
"Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks."
20
"Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear."
19
"If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person."
19
"Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used."
19
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
19
"I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating."
19
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