LANGUAGE QUOTES III

quotations about language

Language quote

Consider: you're inventing language and you come on an object for the first time, so you name it 'tree.' Then you go on and you find another object. You have the choice of calling it tree-only-with-special-properties, such as squat, hard, gray, leafless, and branchless, for instance -- or you can name it a completely different object, say: 'rock.' And then the next object you encounter you may decide is a 'big rock,' or a 'boulder,' or a 'bush,' or 'a small, squat tree,' and so on. Now two languages will not only have different words for the same things, but they will end up having divided those same things up into categories and properties along completely different lines. And that division, as much or more than the different words themselves, will naturally mold all the thinking of the people who use that language.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

Neveryon

Tags: Samuel R. Delany


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.

NOAH WEBSTER

preface, Dictionary


A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

GASTON BACHELARD

Fragments of a Poetics of Fire

Tags: Gaston Bachelard


Language is the sole instrument through which all life's activities are performed. Language is therefore not merely a picture of reality per se but also a willing instrument of the language-user to map the reality.

R. C. PRADHAN

Language, Reality, and Transcendence: An Essay on the Main Strands of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy


One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT

attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds: Selections from the Writings of the Most Celebrated Authors from the Earliest to the Present Time


Learning a language is the making of shared semantic agreements with others.

PHIL BAINES & ANDREW HASLAM

Type and Typography


The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Morning Yet on Creation Day

Tags: Chinua Achebe


It requires a strong mind to bear up against several languages. Some persons have learnt so many, that they have ceased to think in any one.

ARTHUR HELPS

Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd

Tags: Arthur Helps


Thought is not language. Thought is not based on language. Thought does not depend on language; language is not a condition for thought. There is no essential connection between language and thinking except in two senses: that language is a translating device for the imperfect expression of thought or of the awareness of experience; and without thinking humans could not produce language.

AMOREY GETHIN

Language and Thought: A Rational Enquiry Into Their Nature and Relationship


He has strangled
His language in his tears.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Henry VIII

Tags: William Shakespeare


for many people, language is inseparable from cultural identity since it is the means by which members of communities communicate with one another, and how individuals establish that they are, in fact, members of the same cultural community.

LILY WONG FILLMORE

"What Happens When Languages Are Lost? An Essay on Language Assimilation and Cultural Identity", Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language


At the end of the day, good language is bold language.

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE

"Pamela Love and Francesco Clemente Reflect on Decades of Collaboration", Vogue, April 4, 2016


Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

MURIEL BARBERY

The Elegance of the Hedgehog


Language is a virus from outer space.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH

Twenty/Twenty


Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

HAROLD PINTER

Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 2005

Tags: Harold Pinter


Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee; it springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true as his speech.

BEN JONSON

Timber: Or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter

Tags: Ben Jonson


Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

ROLAND BARTHES

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Tags: Roland Barthes


We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.

ELLEN GILCHRIST

Falling Through Space

Tags: Ellen Gilchrist


The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step.

LEONARD BLOOMFIELD

Language


The sole constitutional office of language being to express our ideas and sentiments, it becomes more and more perfect and useful, the more effectually it subserves this sole end of its creation.

ORSON SQUIRE FOWLER

Memory and Intellectual Improvement