Germanic languages

"Now the use of English is really a reflection of chicness. Meaning is not always important."

"The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship."

"To boldly go is rhythmically very neat. The Star Trek scriptwriter hasn't been linguistically bold at all."

"Luther is often praised for having given, in the 'September Bible', a language to the emerging German nation. In his Bible translation, Tyndale's conscious use of everyday words, without inversions, in a neutral word-order, and his wonderful ear for rhythmic patterns, gave to English not only a Bible language, but a new prose. England was blessed as a nation in that the language of its principal book, as the Bible in English rapidly became, was the fountain from which flowed the lucidity, suppleness and expressive range of the greatest prose thereafter."

"The English language is the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven."

"Five generations ago, Britain was ashamed to write books in her own tongue. Now her language is spoken in all quarters of the globe."

"English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality."

"The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish...."

"[A speaker who uses a multiple negative] spreads as it were a thin layer of negative colouring over the whole sentence instead of confining it to a single place."

"The name ["split infinitive"] is misleading, for the preposition to no more belongs to the infinitive as a necessary part of it, than the definite article belongs to the substantive, and no one would think of calling "the good man" a split substantive."

"I say looking at the next 100 years that there are two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward what we call a type one civilization, a planetary civilization... What is English? English is the beginning of a type one language. Everywhere I go around the Earth, people speak English because that is the lingua franca of science, technology, business. They all speak English. It is the number one second language on the planet Earth."

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. 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."

"Fussing about split infinitives is one of the more tiresome pastimes invented by nineteenth-century grammarians."

"Johannes Diderik van der Waals (1837–1923) graduated in 1873 in Leyden with a thesis that would make him famous. It was in Dutch ... The famous ... physicist James Clerk Maxwell, much impressed with this piece of work, remarked that it had prompted quite a few researchers to take up the study of the 'Low Dutch Language'. ... In 1910, Van der Waals received the Nobel Prize, but the 'Low Dutch Language' never made it as an internationally accepted language of science, which in previous centuries had been Latin and Greek, later German, French and English. Today, to the regret of some, all science happens in English."

"I just wanted to say something about (...) my resentment of the identification of this country of Britain with royalty. As if we have nothing else to offer as a culture – the country of my birth. The great contribution, of the English anyway, to the world is literature and language. That language and literature is, in fact, in its tradition quite extensively republican and democratic. I mean our Blake, Milton, our Shelley, many many other great writers, poetry and prose, have been against the idea that Britain is a feudal or monarchic system. One of the great aspects of that tradition is represented by the name Thomas Paine, who is the moral author of your Declaration of Independence. In fact, one of the great accomplishments of the English republican movement, if you like, is the American Declaration of Independence. So it has always struck me as rather bizarre that there is this cult in the United States of English royalism – just the sort of thing I left England to get away from."

"In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an “it.” And if I called my grandmother or the person sitting across the room from me an “it,” that would be so rude, right? And we wouldn’t tolerate that for members of our own species, but we not only tolerate it, but it’s the only way we have in the English language to speak of other beings, is as “it.” In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as “its”...the language of “it,” which distances, disrespects, and objectifies, I can’t help but think is at the root of a worldview that allows us to exploit nature."

"[...] you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids [...], and no more legitimate than any of the other results."

"It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language. A Frenchman in America is not expected to talk like an American, but an Englishman speaking his mother tongue is thought to be affected and giving himself airs. Or else he is taken for a German or a Dutchman, and is complimented on his grammatical mastery of the language of another nation."

"The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language."

"We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language."

"The two great conceptual revolutions of twentieth-century science, the overturning of classical physics by Werner Heisenberg and the overturning of the foundations of mathematics by Kurt Gödel, occurred within six years of each other within the narrow boundaries of German-speaking Europe. ...A study of the historical background of German intellectual life in the 1920s reveals strong links between them. Physicists and mathematicians were exposed simultaneously to external influences that pushed them along parallel paths. ...Two people who came early and strongly under the influence of Spengler's philosophy were the mathematician Hermann Weyl and the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. ...Weyle and Schrödinger agreed with Spengler that the coming revolution would sweep away the principle of physical causality. The erstwhile revolutionaries David Hilbert and Albert Einstein found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defenders of the status quo, Hilbert defending the primacy of formal logic in the foundations of mathematics, Einstein defending the primacy of causality in physics. In the short run, Hilbert and Einstein were defeated and the Spenglerian ideology of revolution triumphed, both in physics and in mathematics. Heisenberg discovered the true limits of causality in atomic processes, and Gödel discovered the limits of formal deduction and proof in mathematics. And, as often happens in the history of intellectual revolutions, the achievement of revolutionary goals destroyed the revolutionary ideology that gave them birth. The visions of Spengler, having served their purpose, rapidly became irrelevant."

"A university teaches. What does it teach? It must obviously teach all the languages in which the great literatures which have been preserved were written — Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Scandinavian, and English."

"As a philologist, Victor Klemperer was struck by the way the Nazis delighted in euphemistic neologisms like Volkstumskampf (ethnic conflict) and Flurbereinigung (fundamental cleansing). This daily subversion of the German language, he believed, was far more effective than the more overt kinds of propaganda. Sanitized language also made the cycle of ethnic violence easier to live with."

"Сердцеведением и мудрым познаньем жизни отзовется слово британца; легким щеголем блеснет и разлетится недолговечное слово француза; затейливо придумает свое, не всякому доступное, умно-худощавое слово немец; но нет слова, которое было бы так замашисто, бойко так вырвалось бы из-под самого сердца, так бы кипело и животрепетало, как метко сказанное русское слово."

"During the last century it was lamentable for those who had to witness it, to notice how in these circles I have just mentioned the word 'Germanize' was frivolously played with, though the practice was often well intended. I well remember how in the days of my youth this very term used to give rise to notions which were false to an incredible degree. Even in Pan-German circles one heard the opinion expressed that the Austrian Germans might very well succeed in Germanizing the Austrian Slavs, if only the Government would be ready to co-operate. Those people did not understand that a policy of Germanization can be carried out only as regards human beings. What they mostly meant by Germanization was a process of forcing other people to speak the German language. But it is almost inconceivable how such a mistake could be made as to think that a Nigger or a Chinaman will become a German because he has learned the German language and is willing to speak German for the future, and even to cast his vote for a German political party. Our bourgeois nationalists could never clearly see that such a process of Germanization is in reality de-Germanization; for even if all the outstanding and visible differences between the various peoples could be bridged over and finally wiped out by the use of a common language, that would produce a process of bastardization which in this case would not signify Germanization but the annihilation of the German element. In the course of history it has happened only too often that a conquering race succeeded by external force in compelling the people whom they subjected to speak the tongue of the conqueror and that after a thousand years their language was spoken by another people and that thus the conqueror finally turned out to be the conquered."

"Not only in Austria, however, but also in the Reich, these so-called national circles were, and still are, under the influence of similar erroneous ideas. Unfortunately, a policy towards Poland, whereby the East was to be Germanized, was demanded by many and was based on the same false reasoning. Here again it was believed that the Polish people could be Germanized by being compelled to use the German language. The result would have been fatal. A people of foreign race would have had to use the German language to express modes of thought that were foreign to the German, thus compromising by its own inferiority the dignity and nobility of our nation."

"I am a German nationalist. This means that I proclaim my nationality. My whole thought and action belongs to it. I am a socialist. I see no class and no social estate before me, but that community of the Folk, made up of people who are linked by blood, united by a language, and subject to a same general fate. I love this Folk and hate only its majority of the moment, because I view the latter to be just as little representative of the greatness of my Folk as it is of its happiness."

"The people from Prague and other Czechs should be whipped who speak half Czech and half German (...) And who could enumerate how the Czech language has already been corrupted, so that the true Czech hears they speak, but he does not understand them. And from that arises envy, anger, conflict, strife and Czech humiliation."

"Most commonly, Holocaust survivors respond with habitual panic when exposed to triggers that in some way symbolize the Holocaust. Such Holocaust associated triggers may include any or all of the following: crowded trains, train stations, medical exams, a knock at the door, uniforms, extermination (of insects), yellow color, selections, gas, shower, barbed wire, discarding food (especially bread), fences, cruelty, barking dogs, any major disaster or discrimination, separations, the smell of burned flesh, closed spaces, an oven, standing in line, the freezing cold, music by Wagner, the German language and German products in general. Any of these stimuli may create a violent emotional response in the survivor who at that moment is thrown back to a life-threatening situation during the Holocaust. In addition, happy occasions such as weddings, Jewish holidays and family celebrations may also evoke sudden grief reactions, as they remind survivors of their immense loss and all the people who are absent because they were so brutally killed. As a consequence, there is frequently a contradictory effort both to remember and to forget, both to approach and to avoid the traumatic event in a compulsively repeated fashion. Like a broken record that is spinning around and around, intrusive experienced images and painful memories keep coming back while at the same time there is a conscious effort to avoid them and not to think about them."

"For my own part I have never been able to understand how he [Hitler] was capable, with his unmelodious and raucous voice, with his crude, often un-Germanically constructed sentences, and with a conspicuous rhetoric entirely at odds with the character of the German language, of winning over the masses with his speeches, of holding their attention and subjugating them for such appalling lengths of time."

"For many Germans, self-determination was both persecution and promise. About ten million speakers of the German language, former subjects of the Habsburg monarchy, remained beyond Germany’s borders. Some three million such people inhabited the northwestern rim of Czechoslovakia, right at the border of Czechoslovakia and Germany. There were more Germans in Czechoslovakia than there were Slovaks. Almost the entire population of Austria, resting between Czechoslovakia and Germany, were German speakers. Austria was nevertheless required by the Treaty of St. Germain to exist as a separate state, although much of its population would have preferred accession to Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party established in 1920, was an Austrian and an advocate of an Anschluss: a unification of Austria and Germany. Such goals of national unity, dramatic as they were, actually concealed the full measure of Hitler’s ambitions."

"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

"Some German words are so long that they have a perspective. Observe these examples:"

"This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright colored flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room, separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars."

"A custom exists among our entire nation, where the inland peoples acquire the Dutch language, that they pronounce it in a very crooked and incomprehensible way, and cause us to imitate them therein, so that our Dutch children also acquire this practice, and the basis is laid for a broken language which eventually will be impossible to exterminate. Even less shall we be able to introduce the Dutch language among the Hottentot peoples, while they lack no competence in pronouncing the words correctly, without error, if you endeavor to dictate carefully to them, to which we should invest somewhat greater care."

"The language of the rural people is as little pure Dutch as the language of German farmers is pure German. The men have a fulsome speech and the women folk have assumed ways of speaking which at times are truly ridiculous."

"Translated from German: Die Sprache der Landleute ist so wenig reine Holländische Mundart als die teutschen Bauern reines Teutsch sprechen. Die Mannspersonen nehmen das Maul dabei sehr voll, und das Frauenvolk hat Redensarten angenommen, die zuweilen recht lächerlich sind. Zum Exempel. Man frägt etwan, ob sie keine Bibel haben, so erfolgt die Antwort: "Onz heeft" geen Bijbel ... Wenn man sie aber aldann frägt: Wie viel Unzen gehen auf ein Pfund? so werden die schamroth."

"He had lost his mother tongue almost completely and acquired the mutilated Dutch of the colonists."

"[I am acquainted with] that kind of bastard Dutch which was spoken in this country by the farmers and slaves, as well as among the Hottentots and various other heathen races, and which is not entirely absent from the speech of even the most cultured among Christians and the upper classes of people."

"The main purpose of the following collection, as one can immediately infer from the title of our work, was to eradicate from the Dutch spoken in this Colony, if it can be referred to by that name, words and expressions which are either entirely strange, or mutilated, or at least to indicate in which way this may be done."

"Translated from Dutch: Het hoofddoel van de volgende verzameling, gelijk men al dadelijk uit den titel van ons werk kan afleiden, was om het Nederduitsch, voor zoo ver de taal, die in deze Kolonie gesproken wordt, dien naam dragen mag, van deels geheel vreemde, deels verminkte woorden en spreekwijzen te zuiveren, of althans den weg daartoe aan te wijzen."

"You can trust me that the plat Hollands is read more among us farmers than that which Changuion wants to teach us in his booklets."

"Translated from Cape Dutch: Jij kan ver mij gloo dat die plat Hollans meer gelees wor onder ons boere as die wat Sankion ver ons wil leer in zijn boekies."

"The language of the Cape! … As if the miserable, bastard jargon, which is the vernacular of this country, is worthy of the name of language at all. … The poverty of expression in this jargon is such, that we defy any man to express thought in it above the merest common-place … There can be no literature with such a language, for poor as it is, it is hardly a written one … Let, then, your language and your nationality go, and believe us, you need not fear for your religion."

"You neither speak Dutch, that is the pure old Holland vernacular, much less would you soil your lips with the patois of the Hottentots about us. This I am sure is no offence, if I say you express your thoughts in a way which is not recognised in your pulpits, is not read in your books of law, does not figure in your scientific folios, and far less is it recognised as a language of an enlightened people, for it does not provide a descent vocabulary for the lowest of the low, nor for the highest of the lofty … It is one which is doing you and your children incalculable harm. It cramps your thoughts. It impedes your energies. It brings the blush to every modest women's cheeks, and makes the educated recoil with disgust too often. It corrupts the morals of your children, and befouls their innocent expressions ..."

"People tell you that Afrikaans isn't a language, because it is composed of Dutch, French, Hottentot, etc. However, the manner in which the English language is patched together is wisely hidden."

"True Afrikaners, we call on you to acknowledge with us that the Afrikaans language is the mother tongue that our Dear Lord gave us; and to make a stand with us through thick and thin for our language; and not to rest before our language is generally acknowledged as the national language of our country."

"An attempt is being made by a number of jokers near Cape Town to reduce the "plat Hollands" of the street and the kitchen to a written language and perpetuate it. They are carrying their joke well. They have a newspaper, have published a history of the colony, an almanack, and to crown the joke — a grammar. ... The promoters of the Patriot (accent the last syllable) movement are laughed at and ridiculed but they stick to their joke."

"Poor in the number of its words, weak in its inflections, wanting in accuracy of meaning and incapable in expressing ideas connected with the higher spheres of thought, it will have to undergo great modification before it will be able to produce a literature worthy of the name."

"[They] who … see no possibility of maintaining, or, rather, of restoring among the mass of the old Colonists the language of Holland, would keep out English by trying to make the lingo and slang of the lowest Hottentots the language of these people – even South Africa."

"The protection of our mother tongue must be the most important consideration of such a Bond, for language and nation are one, and those who do not see this as objective, had better not become members of our bond"

"[Although] phonetically Teutonic, it is psychologically essentially a Hottentot idiom. ... It can hardly be expected that the descendants of the Malayo-Polynesian slaves and Hottentot servants, who originally spoke an agglutinative tongue, will have any improving influence on an inflecting language."

"For intellectual training Africander Dutch offers no scope, for it has no literature and a very poor vocabulary. For internal intercourse and as a trade-medium English is superior to it; and for foreign trade it stands nowhere."

"Afrikaans ... elegant; so simple, serious, and earnest."

"The general does not use pure Afrikaans in his speeches, nor a Dutch that can easily be confused with the language of a Dutchman, but a kind of Afrikaans with Dutch inflections that he inserts haphazardly without any particular plan, so that every now and then, by pure chance, he gets one of them in the right place."

"For how long shall we entertain two thoughts? If Dutch is our language, why do we not speak it? If Afrikaans is our language, why do we not write it?"

"The Provincial Council accepted my motion that enables Afrikaans as a permissible medium up to the fourth standard."

"Be loyal unto death to your traditions, to your religion, to your language and to your people."

"Translated from Afrikaans/Dutch: Wees getrou tot den dood aan uwe tradities, aan uw Godsdie[nst,] aan uw taal, aan uw volk."

"If Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom went to ruin it would be an irrevoc­able catastrophe for South Africa. And it must not happen under any circumstances, for who has up to now preserved Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom? Not these people who hold symposia and talk big. The National Party brought Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom into being. ... Afrikaans is spoken in circles in which it was never spoken before. Today there is respect for Afrikaans from people who never had respect for it before. We should not complain that Afrikaans is going to ruin [due to language policy]. We should take pride and rejoice that Afrikaans is progressing with rapid strides in South Africa!"

"...a bridge between the great, luminous West and magical Africa … Our task lies in the current and future implementation of this gleaming vehicle ..."

"Were it not that Afrikaans literature glorifies white supremacy, and were it not for the unutterable evil this literature breathes, one would simply dismiss it as inane, a crushing bore."

"Will Afrikaans survive the Afrikaner empire?"

"The recent strikes by schools against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction is a sign of demonstration against schools' systematised to producing 'good industrial boys' for the powers that be... We therefore resolve to totally reject the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, to fully support the students who took the stand in the rejection of this dialect [and] also to condemn the racially separated education system."

"The government is prepared to be as accommodating as possible as far as the use of Afrikaans at African schools is concerned. ... In the white areas of South Africa [however, including Soweto], where the government erects the buildings, grants the subsidies and pays the teachers, it is our right to decide on language policy. The same applies to schools in areas where there is no compulsory education. Why are pupils sent to schools if [the government's] language policy does not suit them?"

"Unfortunately Afrikaans acquired certain historic connotations that resulted in its rejection by the black man, and these are political connotations."

"And Afrikaans, this child from the soil of Africa, has already become an instrument for millions of people – yes, for more than just the Afrikaner … God's plan, however, had been the creation of another civilization with a new language from Africa … Afrikaans and this beautiful southern land are undeniably grown together."

"Afrikaans is a language that grew and developed from the soil of South Africa, aided by a variety of languages and cultures in our land, rooted in the search for an own identity and freedom. Its power and hope for the future has never been based on special privilege; but rather as one of the languages of South Africa which will have to meet the future shoulder to shoulder, with mutual respect and equal rights."

"At present local English does not seem to have any particular social value, and thus there is no apparent reason for its speakers to wish to preserve its distinctive features. This is not true of non-standard Afrikaans, which is valued as warm, intimate, and a sign of membership of the community."

"Seen socio-linguistically, a language can never fully clothe the intellectual and affective life of its speakers unless granted entree to all functions. Of particular importance is that a language must enjoy access to the academic-scientific fields of language such as in politics, law, the media, and the university. Throughout the twentieth century, for just the reason of realising this ideal, immense expertise and energy went into developing Afrikaans. One thinks ... of the numerous scholars who could have made their mark internationally but chose instead to devote themselves to Afrikaans."

"...architect Jan van Wijk’s remarkable 1975 tribute to one of the world’s ugliest languages makes, if nothing else, a great picnic spot on the way to the wine lands of Franschhoek and Stellenbosch."

"…as it happens I am Afrikaans. …I actually do not think about it too much, just as I do not think about it too much that I have a liver. The current flutterings about Afrikaans, however, I find disturbing. It is not doing the image of Afrikaners, and hence also of Afrikaans, any good. …to beat one's chest in such a self-justificatory manner [a mere ten years after the end of apartheid] is bad taste morally. […] We are … being called up by certain parties to mobilise for Afrikaans, to fight for the survival of Afrikaans, and for minority rights. The problem is, however, that I do not see myself currently as part of a minority. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, as an Afrikaner, I resisted apartheid – and not in the 1990s when it became fashionable – then I felt myself part of a minority."

"At school, Afrikaans was a compulsory subject that I disliked intensely; it was a harsh language, like the people who spoke it. [...] In my father’s shop, ... I found ... to my surprise, that I was beginning to enjoy the language. [The] warm straightforwardness and ... earthiness in many of these people ... was richly and idiomatically expressed in their speech. And, although I have never advanced beyond being able to speak a sort of kombuistaal, I delighted in our conversations."

"Slaves and Khoikhoi servants had the greatest hand in the development of the restructured Dutch. In the course of the eighteenth century both burghers and their servants, in interaction with each other, took the restructuring further. Dutch was simplified and a considerable amount of Malayo-Portuguese, as spoken the slaves, was injected. By the end of the century Cape Dutch had largely become what is now Afrikaans. In the western Cape, especially in its rural towns and farms, the main variety of Afrikaans took root as the shared cultural creation..."

"The first attempt to formulate a distinctive Afrikaner historiography was made by [Afrikaner] residents of the small town of Paarl [who] founded the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (Society of True Afrikaners). They were effectively reacting against cultural domination by the British colonial regime. ... They based their own history on publications by European authors who were critical of British imperialism and on private correspondence and interviews with fellow Afrikaners. Though this was simple, naive history, it was a path-breaking achievement. It was the first book published in Afrikaans – the spoken language of the people – as distinct from Dutch, from which it had grown apart in the South African milieu by simplifying the syntax, changing the vowel sounds, losing vocabulary items that were not relevant, and incorporating loan words from the other languages that were spoken at the Cape in the eighteenth century – Malay, Portuguese creole, and Khoikhoi."

"The seeds planted by the Paarl thought leadership did not bear much fruit so long as Afrikaners were divided between colonial and republican regimes. ... In spite of many setbacks, Afrikaner leadership gradually attained their nationalist goals... They also re-segregated the white group into Afrikaans-speaking versus the rest. Afrikaans became the premier official language while English was given second-class treatment. The leadership vowed that there was to be no mixing of language, no mixing of cultures, no mixing of religions and no mixing of races."

"At the heart of Afrikaner nationalist struggle was the attempt to imagine a new national community with its language enjoying parity of esteem with English in the public sphere. ... This meant that Afrikaans had to be heard in parliament, the civil service, schools, colleges and universities, and in the world of business and finance; it had to be the medium of newspapers, novels, and poems, giving expression to what was truly South African. Instead of English-speakers portraying Afrikaners in reports, novels or histories as everything they were not: unrefined, semi-literate, racist, dogmatic, and unprogressive, Afrikaners had to define and represent themselves as the true South Africans."

"A good local example of [the process of promoting a language] is Afrikaans: a 150 years ago, Afrikaans was generally regarded as “a mere vernacular” (in the negative sense of the word), used only in the lowest social functions, was without a writing system and had no literature. Gradually, however, it became used as an instrument in the struggle against the imperialism of the British colonial government and against the Dutch-oriented elite’s preference for Dutch (and English) in high-function contexts[.] A number of teachers and church ministers then initiated a movement directed at the development (corpus planning) and promotion (status and prestige planning) of Afrikaans. Gradually, a feeling of pride in and loyalty to Afrikaans developed, and within about 60 years Afrikaans was recognised as a language of the public domain[,] a fully-fledged standard language."

"Few languages have engendered as much controversy, with regard to both historical development and place in modern society."

"Afrikaans will survive and develop further in a range of dialects. That is important to me, that type of freedom. The Afrikaners don’t mean much to me."

"This is why Afrikaans-exclusive or even Afrikaans-dominant white schools and universities represent a serious threat to race relations in South Africa. You simply cannot prepare young people for dealing with the scars of our violent past without creating optimal opportunities in the educational environment for living and learning together."

"Afrikaans is a cancer that must be destroyed."

"By the 1990s Afrikaans was no longer the instrument of a chauvinistic Afrikaner nationalism. Afrikaner historians had begun to stress the multifaceted nature of our history, Afrikaans as a medium of instruction was no longer imposed on black schools and the language had been scaled back drastically on state radio and television. But [it could be celebrated that] Afrikaans, along with only three others (Hebrew, Indonesian and Hindi) were the only languages that in the course of the twentieth century made the transition from a low status, spoken language to a language used in all walks of public life, including literature, science and technology."

"The past 15 years have been characterised by an increasing migration of Afrikaans speakers into the digital space – a space that offers exciting new opportunities for Afrikaans."

"... socio-political history often casts Afrikaans as the language of racists, oppressors and unreconstructed nationalists. But [Afrikaans] also bears the imprint of a fierce tradition of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, of an all-embracing humanism and anti-apartheid activism."

"The world [of 2017] looks completely different than in 1937. Then, communication was limited, and the introduction of radio – in Afrikaans – changed the world."

"Die Kandidaat, Katrina and Jannie Totsiens constitute the golden era of Afrikaans film, as they delivered products of quality and intent which have probably not been met since. … these dynamic films sought to open up the eyes of the viewers to the brutally harmful and hurtful results of institutionalised apartheid on the other segments of the society, especially so to the so-called “Coloured” community. [Their] exclusion [from] Afrikaner identity, though sharing most of the culture and speaking the same language as “Afrikaners”, forms a central theme…"

"A language without a commercial value will die."

"The youth culture grabs the young language by its foreskin and gives it its first democratic climax!"

"It is unbelievable and / or unfortunate that even until today in this constitutional democracy we still have a society that sees nothing wrong with a language that was used as a tool of segregation and discrimination during apartheid which 90 percent of South African[s] bemoan; a language whose legacy is sorrow and tears to the majority of whom it was not their mother tongue."

"By the time the protesters outside Hoërskool Overvaal lobbed a petrol bomb at the police, it was clear that something as simple as a school’s language policy could still inflame deadly passions 41 years after the Soweto Uprising against Afrikaans in black schools. I could not help thinking: what is it about Afrikaans that brings out the worst in us?"

"The courageous fight of the Afrikaans newspaper Vrye Weekblad against the apartheid state, its unearthing of apartheid secrets during the states of emergency in Afrikaans needs a firmer place in our Struggle history. The vicious responses to Max du Preez, Jacques Pauw and Vrye Weekblad journalists by the apartheid state, where the courts were used to close it down, is part of the proud resistance history of Afrikaans."

"I publicly and in my personal capacity disagree with the phasing out of Afrikaans as one of the mediums of teaching at the University of Pretoria. As a country, you are shooting yourselves down. You will regret it in 30 years’ time."

"There was some misunderstanding between ourselves and the minority groups in the country, to be quite frank, especially people that are speaking Afrikaans, because the previous regime invested a lot of resources and energy in them. Our coloured communities feel marginalised, not loved, feel they are on the periphery."

"Everyone knows that the DA has failed to stand up for Afrikaans language and cultural rights despite their guarantee in the Constitution."

"For Afrikaans as a language of instruction, this is a major setback. The language's ability to subsequently recover at tertiary level is most limited if aggressive efforts are not made from Afrikaans ranks to keep it alive as a language of instruction. Being pro-Afrikaans does not mean being anti-English. For that we have empathy. This is about the official recognition of a language and everything that happens concerning it. This is about the violation of a basic human right, namely the maintenance of a language."

"The fact the Supreme Court of Appeal delivered this ruling is of great interest – it is the highest court that has yet ruled in favour of Afrikaans education on tertiary level. The cost order against Unisa further confirms the moral high ground of students who demand the right to education in their native language. ... The ruling emphasises that Afrikaans also has a place on government-supported campuses."

"... the DA is already preparing for a historic and unprecedented political campaign to demand that Afrikaans be equated with English at SU."

"Inclusivity means that you involve all the speakers of all the varieties on an equal footing. No variety, including the standard variety, is considered more important than the others. Afrikaans is the sum of the language's varieties. We need to be able to greet each other with a mirrag, hoesit, saloet and aweh. ... Broad alliances – in the spirit of the multilingualism advocate dr. Neville Alexander – is required to oppose the hegemony of English and create space for the indigenous languages, Afrikaans included."

"... the new language policy [at Stellenbosch University] must explicitly commit to increasing the Afrikaans offer to ensure full access for all deserving students who wish to study in Afrikaans ..."

"... one finds that that those who are calling for the exclusive use of Afrikaans in certain schools are actually inviting antipathy [which takes the] form of annual political football that politicians use to their advantage, which is a shame. Afrikaans is not an exclusive language for racist Afrikaners. In fact, the majority of its speakers, by dint of history, are not “Afrikaners”, ..."

"Attempting to meet European standards, Jewish writers exerted tremendous efforts to develop and enrich the Jews' internal languages of Hebrew and Yiddish, all the while combating unfavorable ideas about each. Yiddish was a living language at the time, but even its leading writers Sholem Aleichem and Y. L. Peretz dubbed it jargon (slang). Hebrew, for its part, was considered a dead tongue in need of massive revision. Both languages were invigorated by the extensive enterprise of translation and the expansion of Jewish writing to areas like politics, art, and sciences, which, with rare exception, were not previously found within either canon."

"Hebrew was generally considered the province of men and became associated with the male scholarly elite, in contrast to Yiddish, which became linked with women, common folk, and daily routine."

"already by 1918, the Communists had created the Evsektsiia within its own structure to carry out party policy among the Jews. Regarding the values and institutions of the Jewish community as alien to Marxist ideology and to the new society that was to be based on it, the Evsektsiia took over local Jewish organizations and institutions and set out to eliminate not only the Zionist movement and Jewish religion but also the "bourgeois language" of Hebrew. Yiddish, meanwhile, was allowed to flourish, for it was deemed the language of the proletariat."

"Ironically, in view of later events, the relationships between Germans and Jews in these borderlands were sometimes close to symbiotic. Both groups were more likely than Slavs to live in towns; they also spoke variations of the German language, since the Yiddish of the East European shtetl (literally, 'wee town', identical to the German Stàdtl) was essentially a German dialect, no further removed from High German than the language of the Transylvanian Saxons, even if in Galicia Yiddish signs were often written in Hebrew characters."

"[Yiddish is] a treasure trove for the study of language and culture in general: cultural interaction, semiotics of cultural history, and languages in contact."

"YIVO’s founding emboldened a highbrow Yiddish intellectual life that flourished between the world wars and soon used the new spelling as its hallmark. Of course, it was already too late. By 1945 the Nazis had killed the majority of the world’s Yiddish speakers. YIVO itself survived only through the efforts of Jewish prisoners, including celebrated poets who were forced by the Germans to loot YIVO’s archives for a Nazi-created “Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question.” Members of this “paper brigade” risked their lives to smuggle out cultural treasures, including documents that scholars had painstakingly collected to record and standardize Yiddish spelling."

"Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban population. It had the limitations of its origins. There were few Yiddish words for animals and birds. It had virtually no military vocabulary. Such voids were filled by borrowing from German, Polish and Russian. Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic, from Hebrew, from Aramaic and from anything with which it intersected. On the other hand, it contributed: English - American. Its chief virtue lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions. It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog, of pathos, resignation and suffering, all of which it palliated by humor, intense irony and superstition. It has been said the Yiddish is the only language never spoken by anyone in power."

"The use of Yiddish was an expression not only of love of a language, but of pride in ourselves as a people; it was an acknowledgement of a historical and cultural yerushe, heritage, a link to generations of Jews who came before and to the political activists of Eastern Europe. Above all it was the symbol of resistance to assimilation, an insistence on remaining who we were."

"The survival of Yiddish and its culture does not rest on our ability to find the right term for "corn flakes" or "jet lag"; but rather on our ability to find a proper place for yidishe kultur in our lives, a place among other commitments; on our ability to infuse it with our contemporary values and politics learned outside of its boundaries...I want my Yiddish involvement to be rooted in my life, in the present, want it to be infused with my contemporary politics and concerns, with the special quality of Jewish American experience. Di yidishe svive in the American environment. One world, not two. That's what will keep Yiddish alive for me."

"Emphasizing the seemingly more pious stories of Sholem Aleykhem and Peretz, stressing Jewish passivity over action, obedience to tradition over rebellion (and therefore upholding observance), many supporters of Yiddish and Yiddish culture have wrenched yidishkayt out of the active, political and radical context in which it flourished and thereby neutralized and depoliticized it."

"Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears."

"To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical. One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning. [...] Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists - rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity."

"People ask me often, 'Why do you write in a dying language?' [...] I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish and as far as I know, they all speak it. Secondly, not only do I believe in ghosts, but also in resurrection. I am sure that millions of Yiddish speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day and their first question will be: "Is there any new Yiddish book to read?" For them Yiddish will not be dead. [...] Yiddish may be a dying language but it is the only language I know well. Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead."

"The language's fate would be entangled with one of the world's most brutal tragedies—millions of those Yiddish speakers were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust during the Second World War—but it also flowered almost everywhere that Jews settled, before and after the war: Yiddish newspapers and books were published in Montreal and Montevideo, Cairo and Melbourne, Paris and Cape Town (not to mention Warsaw and New York)"

"Celebrated and marginalized, lionized and trivialized, Yiddish is so deeply woven into the fabric of the United States that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize how much it has transformed the world we live in today...... At the height of the language's American popularity in the 1920s, a handful of different Yiddish newspapers circulated hundreds of thousands of copies every day, and Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue, in Manhattan, seated thousands of spectators every night. Also, as the primary language of a vast immigrant community of poor laborers and their upwardly mobile children, Yiddish became a crucial part of American politics—at a moment when socialism, anarchism, and communism competed for Americans' votes with more familiar political orientations—and of American business, entertainment, cuisine, and speech. In short, America, famously a nation of immigrants, was the site of many of Yiddish's greatest triumphs—[[Isaac Bashevis Singer"

"For the most part, the histories of Yiddish and its literature seldom give space to its production in Latin America... this anthology documents that Yiddish—or, in one of its Spanish spellings, idish also flourished in Latin America, leaving behind powerfully artistic testaments."

"Yiddish is a relaxed language, extravagantly hospitable to Hebrew, Polish, Russian, German, and French, lush with a vocabulary full of love terms, diminutives, compounds, and neologisms."

"At the beginning of the century the vast majority of Jews were Yiddish-speaking Europeans, with Yiddish the main vehicle of secularization, modernization, revolution, and reform. By the end of the century, Yiddish was in daily use only among the so-called ultraorthodox while the growing majority of Jews in Israel spoke Hebrew and the shrinking minority of Jews in America spoke English."

"Yiddish was the European language most directly affected by Nazi rule. Although linguistic assimilation had become the norm by the 1930s among Jews in western Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, it was slowed in Poland by some of the external and internal forces of exclusion and renaissance alluded to in the previous chapters. Thus, Yiddish was the main language of the ghettos, and of the majority of Jews targeted for annihilation, though most Jews also knew at least one coterritorial language."

"In an interview late in his life, Ahrne Thorne, the last editor of the Yiddish paper the Fraye Arbeter Shtime said, simply, “Yiddish is my homeland.”"

"A Swedish sociologist told me recently that he had approached the information desk at Stockholm Central Station to ask about train times and been asked to rephrase his question in English. The desk was manned by an English person who did not speak Swedish. There are other countries where almost everyone can be expected to speak English as a second language well enough to ask for information about a train (although this may well not be true of Syrian refugees and other immigrants). But it’s hard to imagine any other country where the information desk in the train station of the country’s capital is manned by someone who doesn’t actually speak the native language. To do so might seem an act of national self-abnegation, an enormous cultural cringe. But that would be to understand Sweden quite backward. It is a country so self-confident in some ways that the language in which Swedishness is expressed seems unimportant."

"Actually, the Swedish genealogists were so good that I found out more than I wanted to about my Swedish ancestors: one of them in the 17th century was executed for having embezzled funds from an estate for which he was the steward... As for the name Rehnquist, I am quite uncertain as to its origin. Under the Swedish patronymic system of naming, my grandfather and his brothers would have been named Anderson, since Anders was the name of their father. "Quist" in Swedish means branch, I am told. For example, "Lindquist" means lime branch or linden branch, and Palmquist means palm branch. The best I can come up with is that the "rehn" in my name refers to a small village near the farm on which my grandfather grew up. It has been said that Sweden's loss has been America's gain, and I think this is true. Swedish immigrants and their descendents have contributed a great deal to America and it is worthwhile to remember our Swedish heritage."