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Language Quotes
"Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence."
12
"Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks."
12
"There are some sounds that English singers find quite difficult to manipulate."
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
"We need a president who's fluent in at least one language."
12
"It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language."
12
"If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."
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
"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."
11
"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."
11
"The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it."
11
"A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion."
11
"Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession."
11
"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."
11
"'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word."
11
"A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative."
11
"I am not 100% English, I am actually part Italian and even part Hungarian. Therefore I feel very much part of Europe both in my upbringing and outlook."
11
"In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language."
11
"No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism."
11
"To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up."
11
"I haven't spoken English with native speakers in several months. I've been speaking Arabic."
11
"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."
11
"Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries."
11
"It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip."
11
"But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice."
11
"Words are the clothes thoughts wear."
11
"These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages."
11
"What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were - and still are - condescended to by the English."
10
"Further, I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies."
10
"The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment."
10
"Well, I am from India and I wanted to make films in English for the international market in India. So that was really the main thing, and then of course economically it was cheaper to make films in India."
10
"In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages."
10
"Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar."
10
"I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language."
10
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