Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

..all subjects are forms of discourse and that, therefore, almost all education is a form of language education. Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals; it is a special language employed to speak about plants and animals. History is not events that once occurred; it is a language describing and interpreting events, according to rules established by historians. Astronomy is not planets and stars but a special way of talking about planets and stars, quite different from the language poets use to talk about them.

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape—Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this—the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.' I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year').

Alphabet: a symbolic system used in algebra, with applications that have yet to be discovered by dyslexics and two thirds of college graduates.

Alphabet soup is my magic eight ball. Served hot or cold, words are delicious.

Als je zonder je eigen taal leeft, voel je je gewichtloos en tegelijkertijd overbeladen. Je ademt een andere lucht in, op een andere hoogte. Je bent je altijd bewust van het verschil.

Although Swedish is one of the few languages on this Earth that I enjoy the sound of. That and Japanese. French is all right, Italian is tolerable depending on who’s speaking it. Everything else makes me cringe. Even English with some accents is bad. Australian? Spare me.

Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.

Always remember we don’t own the words. We are merely guests in the house of a language.

A man's words reveal, first, the man. The words are not the man, and yet they reveal him faithfully and are to be identified with him. Out of the abundance of the heart, the man speaks. The foundational nature of all language is therefore metaphorical because every word a man speaks reveals himself—just as God reveals Himself through the Word. Every word spoken ultimately reveals the speaker.

A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.

American schools in Guam, both before 1941 and after 1945, were established to eradicate the Chamoru, tongue and person. To educate the old Chamoru out of the new American. The native out of the patriot...But the nastier lesson their schools taught was that their dreams were ours. That indigenous knowledge had no place in the new world...As vehicles for our assimilation, American schools have attached to our longings alien aspirations for material wealth, money and power. How much of our creativity and our vision has already been laid to waste for the sake of these?

A metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression (a form of words) used for artistic or rhetorical purposes; instead, it is a process of human understanding by which we achieve meaningful experience that we can make sense of. A metaphor, in this "experiential" sense, is a process by which we understand and structure one domain of experience in terms of another domain of a different kind.

America where there is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the street in the north; where there are no proof-readers, no silkworms, no digressions; the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand, but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.

An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy. It connects you to another person's culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person's culture. Anyone can learn "bawn-JURE" in a few seconds. To learn how bonjour fits your companion's mouth and tongue; to learn how to manipulate the muscles, the folds, and even the texture of your throat and lips to match your companion's -- this is an unmistakable, undeniable, and irresistable gesture of care.

Analysis of error begins with analysis of language.

And adab towards language means the recognition and acknowledgement of the rightful and proper place of every word in a written or uttered sentence so as not to produce a dissonance in meaning, sound and concept. Literature is called adabiyat in Islam precisely because it is seen as the keeper of civilization, the collector of teachings and statements that educate the self and society with adab such that both are elevated to the rank of the cultured man (insan adabi) and society.

A native tongue, in my opinion, isn't the language spoken where you were born or the first language you learned; it's a language that makes you feel at home. It's a language that you don't command, but that commands you. And without it, you'd feel lost, unsure of how to express to the world everything you care enough to express.

And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-faddle and not faddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-pong and pitter-patter rather than pong-ping and patter-pitter? Why dribs and drabs, rather than vice versa? Why can't a kitchen be span and spic? Whence riff-raff, mish-mash, flim-flam, chit-chat, tit for tat, knick-knack, zig-zag, sing-song, ding-dong, King Kong, criss-cross, shilly-shally, see-saw, hee-haw, flip-flop, hippity-hop, tick-tock, tic-tac-toe, eeny-meeny-miney-moe, bric-a-brac, clickety-clack, hickory-dickory-dock, kit and kaboodle, and bibbity-bobbity-boo? The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back.

And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.

And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity

And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme.

And on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

And now it turns out that women can't even talk like men. Which is a clever way to invalidate women's discourse, isn't it? No wonder women can't do magic; no wonder spirits won't listen to their puny, trivial, voices. It's all woven into the basic structure of the language.

And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity! Unless, that is, one is setting out to produce confusion. (It would also be possible to speak of an activity of butter when it rises in price, and if no problems are produced by this it is harmless.)

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.

And you are right.” He had a wry tone to his voice. “Which I am sure you are going to lord over me.” “I don’t know.” Ginger opened her eyes and tried to match him. “Can one ‘lady it over’ someone?” “My lady, I believe you do that all the time.” “Ah … but I’m not a lady, am I? Simply an American.” “Well, you can definitely American it over someone.

And yet language is the most intimately physical of all the artistic means. We have it palpably in our mouths; it is our langue, our tongue. Writing it, we shape it with our hands. Reading aloud what we have written - as we must do, if we are writing carefully - our language passes in at the eyes, out at the mouth, in at the ears; the words are immersed and steeped in the senses of the body before they make sense in the mind. They cannot make sense in the mind until they have made sense in the body.

And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital "T," which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small "t," which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the other, either. If I, as a Japanese, find this new historical situation a bit tragic, it's not because Japanese people now had a live in two temporalities. It's rather because as a result of having to do so, they had no choice but to enter the asymmetrical relationship that had marked and continues to mark the modern world—the asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West, which is tantamount, however abstractly, to the asymmetrical relationship between what is universal and all the rest that is merely particular.

And who would have ever thought we'd see a time when the period – the building block of our very language, punctuation-wise – would be able to transform an innocent one-line message into a seemingly threatening or aggressive imperative? An era when proper punctuation was, potentially, terrifying?

Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. People in business say that toner cartridges are in short supply, that they have updated the next shipment of these cartridges, and that they will finalize their recommendations at the next meeting of the board. They are speaking a language familiar and dear to them. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; executives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights. We should tolerate them--every person of spirit wants to ride a white horse.

An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented . I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room; I am—

Another thing your teachers didn't tell you is that one day, arguments over whether or not to capitalize the word internet would constitute half your workday and lead to severed ties with many people you once considered close friends and family.

a Novilíngua diferia da maior parte das outras línguas porque o seu vocabulário ia diminuindo em vez de aumentar todos os anos. Cada redução era um ganho, pois quanto menor a área de escolha, menor a tentação de pensar. Como fim último, esperava-se atingir uma linguagem emitida pela laringe, sem passar pelos centros nervosos superiores. Objectivo esse, francamente admitido no termo de Novilíngua "patofalar", que significava "grasnar como um pato". (...) Desde que as opiniões grasnadas fossem ortodoxas, o termo era perfeitamente laudatório; quando o Times se referia a um dos oradores do Partido caracterizando-o como "duploextrabom patofalante" estava a fazer-lhe um elogio caloroso e extremamente apreciado.

Annoyance has made me bilingual.

A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term "we" or "us" without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that "we" are all agreed on "our" interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ("our sensibilities are enraged...") Always ask who this "we" is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron "Maulana" Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called "US." Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was "Wherever US is, We are." It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.

Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.

Anything that can be said can be said clearly.

Apenas tenía diez años, pero acaso entendía ya que una lengua es también una escafandra.

As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer got famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language. The murderer's words and expressions are my unclaimed goods. Besides, the country's littered with words that don't belong to anyone anymore.

A poet if anything must be a poet and far more than just a writer of words. The poet is the storyteller, the shaman, the jester and the rogue. The poet lives in the world of language and imagination, love, death & obsession and yet still sees the universe in the smallest of everyday things that we merely take for granted.

Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.

Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.

Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.

A rumor is usually a lie that the media can legally profit from.

As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.

As a result of the work done by all these stratifying force in language, there are no "neutral" words and forms - words and forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived it socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easy to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.

As a writer, I roll around in words the way cats roll around in catnip.