Language

"The English language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever."

"Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language."

""We worked with a guy called Dr. Stuart Smith from UCLA and he’s an Egyptologist He put all this stuff on tape for us and it’s kind of the closest we can come to what we think the actual language sounded like. It’s like ancient Latin. When we speak Latin now we think it’s what it sounded like, but we’re not really sure. The problem with a lot of this Egyptian stuff is words like ‘look out’ become like 10 lines. Steve would go, ‘No, no, no. Lose the first four words. Say that word and then say the last word.’ So basically, I’d end up making the stuff up."

"Don Chaucer, well of English undefyled On Fame's eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled."

"Ego sum rex Romanus, et supra grammaticam."

"Syllables govern the world."

"No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached"

"L'accent est l'âme du discours, il lui donne le sentiment et la vérité."

"Une louange en grec est d'une merveilleuse efficace à la tête d'un livre."

"La grammaire, qui sait régenter jusqu'aux rois, Et les fait, la main haute, obéir à ses lois."

"Writ in the climate of heaven, in the language spoken by angels."

"L'accent du pays où l'on est né demeure dans l'esprit et dans le cœur comme dans le langage."

"Language is the only instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas."

"And don't confound the language of the nation With long-tailed words in osity and ation."

"“A language, like a species, when extinct, never… reappears.”"

"Language is fossil poetry."

"Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows."

"And who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue? To what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent, T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in th' yet unformed Occident May come refin'd with th' accents that are ours?"

"Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company."

"Well languag'd Danyel."

"But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English […] is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the 'plainest' English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. […] We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness."

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."

"An entire mythology is stored within our language."

"For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either. p. 25"

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."

"Jede Zeit sagt, daß derzeit die Sprache so gefährdet und von Zersetzung bedroht sei wie nie zuvor. In unserer Zeit aber ist die Sprache tatsächlich so gefährdet und von Zersetzung bedroht wie nie zuvor."

"Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later."

"There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other — by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought."

"Speech is the best show a man puts on."

"Language itself inevitably introduced an element of permanence into the world. For, although speech itself is transitory, the conventionalized sound symbols of language transcended time. ...To obtain a greater degree of permanence the time symbols of oral speech had to be converted into the space symbols of written speech. ...The crucial stage in the evolution of writing occurred when ideographs became phonograms..."

"We live in a time of acute bitterness and acrimony, where people’s first (and second and third) impulse is to brutalize, insult, embarrass and demean those who hold different views. The purpose of language, as they see it, isn’t to clarify or enlighten or reason together. It is to inflict the maximum pain possible on other human beings."

"Verbing weirds language."

"That well known distinction between knowing that and knowing how fits the learning of a language....That is, we must distinguish between knowing how to speak or listen to words and knowing that about them. Learning a language is primarily the former."

"Language is a human construct. The more vibrant and fast-moving society is, the more the language changes. That can be a wonderful thing. In fact, one of my favorite books to read in off-hours is H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, written by this genius when he was otherwise censored for his views in wartime. It’s a marvelous chronicling of the evolution of American usage, published in 1919, but oddly pertinent even today, applicable to the dwindling number of people who can still form coherent sentences. When it comes to vocabulary, there are two schools of thought broadly speaking: prescriptivist and descriptivist. The prescriptivist view is that words have embedded meanings that you can trace from other languages and should be used as intended. The descriptivist approach sees language as more a living experience, a tool of utility to make communication possible, in which case anything goes."

"Anyone who invents a language,” he said, “finds that it requires a suitable habitation and a history in which it can develop. A real language is never invented, of course. It is a natural thing. It is wrong to call the language you grow up speaking your native language. It is not. It is your first learnt language. It is a by-product of the total make-up of the animal."

"Language also reveals its power through an insignificant slip of the pen, for no matter how one tries to subject it to control and reduce it to “pure” instrumentality, it always succeeds in giving an inkling of its irreducible governing status."

"Knowledge belongs to the one who succeeds in mastering a language."

"The story of man’s infatuation with his language is an unending one. In a remote village of Africa, a wise Dogon man used to say “to be naked is to be speechless.” Power, as unveiled by numerous contemporary writings, has always inscribed itself in language. Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion."

"Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue. But which shall it be, is the great question. At present it looks as if the English might be adopted as such, though it must be admitted that it is not the most suitable. Each language, of course, excels in some feature.... A practical answer to that momentous question must perforce be found in times to come, for it is manifest that by adopting one common language the onward march of man would be prodigiously quickened. I do not believe that an artificial concoction, like Volapuk, will ever find universal acceptance, however time-saving it might be. That would be contrary to human nature. Languages have grown into our hearts."

"One can learn to speak a new language, but [learning] to embrace the weight of its meaning from its people, within Pacific contexts and mannerism, can never be replaced."

"Oh Lord God, deliver us from this prison, almost as it were, of paper, pen and ink, and of a crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language."

"Language is its own music."

"Thou whoreson Zed! thou unnecessary letter!"

"He has strangled His language in his tears."

"Dick Grayson: Oh, heck! What's the use of learning French anyway?"

"A clever Toronto lawyer was deep into a technical argument before the Supreme Court. His position was dependent upon a close reading of the legal text and turned on the letter of the law. Suddenly the chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, leaned forward and asked the counsel if his argument also worked in French. After all, the law is the law in both languages and a loophole in one tends to evaporate in the other. Only an argument of substance stands up. The lawyer had no idea what to reply."

"It is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated. Totally unrelated languages share in one culture; closely related languages—even a single language—belong to distinct culture spheres. There are many excellent examples in Aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of. The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas... The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves."

"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached … We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."

"…basically, language is an inadequate and limited instrument. No matter what language a writer speaks, she always hopes that it will be universal, that it will transcend the particular ethnic barriers that language creates."