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Language Quotes
"The form language used by the ancient Egyptians in their structures is minimal."
13
"If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person."
13
"A young man who is here speaks the Panis language, and in many other respects, is preferable."
13
"An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity."
13
"All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth."
13
"A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state."
13
"Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?"
13
"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."
13
"The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation."
13
"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."
13
"With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin."
13
"The Germans and I no longer speak the same language."
13
"No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language."
12
"I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story."
12
"Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation."
12
"Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language."
12
"The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics."
12
"I think maybe the English don't want to try something and look stupid, because they are a bit reserved."
12
"Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating."
12
"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'"
12
"Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?"
12
"I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried."
12
"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."
12
"Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages."
12
"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."
12
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable."
12
"When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it."
12
"Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks."
12
"Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s."
12
"The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!"
12
"It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent."
12
"Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things."
12
"We need a president who's fluent in at least one language."
12
"I had said no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him about his saucy language. It had never gotten to this level until I came back."
11
"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."
11
"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."
11
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