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Language

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A conversation in American Sign Language
analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method.—The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged. ~ Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Language is the term commonly used for any distinctive means of communication. There are several types of language, including written language, and oral/aural language (spoken). The study of language is commonly called Linguistics.

CONTENT: A-D, E-H, I-L, M-P, Q-T, U-Z, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia, See also, External links

Quotes

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Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - D

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  • Each language is the sign and power of the soul of the people which naturally speaks it. Each develops therefore its own peculiar spirit, thought-temperament, way of dealing with life and knowledge and experience.... A nation, race or people which loses its language, cannot live its whole life or its real life. And this advantage to the national life is at the same time an advantage to the general life of the human race.
    • Sri Aurobindo, December, 1917, quoted from Sri Aurobindo, ., Nahar, S., Aurobindo, ., & Institut de recherches évolutives (Paris). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches. Paris: Institut de Recherches Evolutives. 3rd Edition (2000). [1]
  • Incorrigible humanity, therefore, led astray by the giant Nimrod, presumed in its heart to outdo in skill not only nature but the source of its own nature, who is God; and began to build a tower in Sennaar, which afterwards was called Babel (that is, 'confusion'). By this means human beings hoped to climb up to heaven, intending in their foolishness not to equal but to excel their creator. ... Only among those who were engaged in a particular activity did their language remain unchanged; so, for in­stance, there was one for all the architects, one for all the carriers of stones, one for all the stone-breakers, and so on for all the different opera­tions. As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented; and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke. But the holy tongue remained to those who had neither joined in the project nor praised it, but instead, thoroughly disdaining it, had made fun of the builders' stupidity.
  • It does not seem likely [...] that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture, but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned by the morphological traits of the language
    • Franz Boas (1911), [ https://books.google.com/books?id=EnZC68mmRhQC Handbook of American Indian languages] (Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology
  • The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.
  • The only thing in life is language. Not love. Not anything else.
    • Richard Burton as quoted by Melvyn Bragg in Richard Burton: A Life (1988)
  • One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.
    • Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations, as translated by Richard Howard (Arcade Publishing: 1991), p. 12.
  • We think only through the medium of words.—Languages are true analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method.—The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.
  • Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups.
    • Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2000) p. vii
  • Although excessive screen time is often frowned upon, language experts say that watching shows in a foreign language -- if done with near obsession -- can help someone learn that language.
    "These stories are hugely common," said Melissa Baese-Berk, associate professor of linguistics and director of the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching program at the University of Oregon. She points to a New York Times story about professional baseball players from Latin America who learned English by watching "Friends" with Spanish subtitles.
    But they didn't just watch "Friends"; they watched it over and over again. Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Freddy Galvis told the Times that he had watched every episode of the 10-season show at least five times.
    Stephen Snyder, dean of language schools at Middlebury College in Vermont, said this story sounds familiar to him.
    "Our Japanese classes are full of Chinese students and American students who grew up watching Japanese anime, and without having any formal training in Japanese, their comprehension is quite reasonable," he said. "It's a transnational phenomenon, and it makes sense." Baese-Berk says science supports what these young people have experienced. Studies show that it's best to acquire a language through both active and passive learning, and watching shows in a foreign language involves both.
    Trying to figure out a word that a character in a telenovela is saying would be an example of active learning, and admiring the character's outfit while hearing Spanish in the background would be an example of passive learning, she said.
  • The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
  • If you smile at me I will understand, cause that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language.
  • Many languages fly around the world
    producing sparks when they collide
    sometimes of hate
    sometimes of love
    • Bei Dao, "Language", in The August Sleepwalker, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (New York: New Directions, 1990), p. 121

E - H

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  • Language may be said, in fact, to be the most indispensable instrument of civilization. It is the means whereby the whole life of the past has been handed to us in the present. It is the means whereby we in turn record, preserve, and transmit our science, our industrial methods, our laws, our customs. If human relations were possible at all without a language, they would have to begin anew, without any cultural inheritance, in each generation. Education, the transmitter of the achievements of the mature generation to the one maturing, is dependent on this unique human capacity to make seen marks and heard sounds stand for other things.
  • Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
  • Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
  • Every time that the language question appears, in one mode or another, it signifies that a series of other problems are beginning to impose themselves: the formation and growth of the ruling class, the need to stabilize the most intimate and secure links between that ruling group and the popular national masses, that is, to reorganize cultural hegemony.
    • Antonio Gramsci in Quaderni dal Carcere, 1935, as quoted in The Social History of Language by P. Burke and R. Porter (1987).
  • Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.
  • One of the results of the rapid depersonalization of our age is a crisis of speech, profanation of language. We have trifled with the name of God, we have taken the name and the word of the Holy in vain. Language has been reduced to labels, talk has become double-talk. We are in the process of losing faith in the reality of words.
    Yet prayer can happen only when words reverberate with power and inner life, when uttered as an earnest, as a promise. On the other hand, there is a high degree of obsolescence in the traditional language of the theology of prayer. Renewal of prayer calls for a renewal of language, of cleansing the words, of revival of meanings.
    The strength of faith is in silence, and in words that hibernate and wait.     Uttered faith must come out as a surplus of silence, as the fruit of lived faith, of enduring intimacy.
    Theological education must deepen privacy, strive for daily renewal of innerness, cultivate ingredients of religious existence, reverence and responsibility.
    • Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997), "No Religion is an Island", p. 264
  • The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.
    • Wilhelm von Humboldt, (1820); in Jürgen Trabant, "How relativistic are Humboldts "Weltansichten"?"; in Martin Putz; Marjolyn Verspoor, eds. (2000), Explorations in linguistic relativity, John Benjamins Publishing Company, ISBN 978-90-272-3706-4
  • 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.
    • Jan Hus in Výklad viery, desatera a páteře (Interpretation of the Faith, the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer) as quoted in A Companion to Jan Hus (2015) by František Šmahel (ed.), pp. 190-191.
  • Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.
    • Mark Hopkins, Address, Dedication of Williston Seminary, Dec. 1, 1841.

I - L

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  • Language is the dress of thought.
    • Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1781), "The Life of Cowley".
  • When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
    • James Earl Jones, 'Voices and Silences (1993) co-written with Penelope Niven; also 2nd edition Voices and Silences: With a New Epilogue (2002) p. 373
  • There was a silence; then, clearing his throat, "Once upon a time," the Director began, "while our Ford was still on earth, there was a little boy called Reuben Rabinovitch. Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents."
The Director interrupted himself. "You know what Polish is, I suppose?"
"A dead language."
"Like French and German," added another student, officiously showing off his learning.
  • Learning a language stretches a long way to help create trust, to strengthen our ability to communicate and to understand another people. It also signals willingness to give up centrality.
    • Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz “Nine Suggestions For Radicals, or Lessons From the Gulf War” in The Issue is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance (1992)
  • We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s[emantic] r[eactions] and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us.
  • Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.
  • For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us.

M - P

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  • How else can I say it? I don't speak no other languages.
  • Men learned to speak in order to understand one another. Cultural languages have lost the ability to help men to advance beyond the most rudimentary level and attain understanding. It seems that the time has come to learn to be silent once again.
    • Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 1923, I, p. 56; as quoted in [3]
  • Here it is fitting to remark that the study of the spontaneous growth of languages is of the utmost importance to those who would logically remodel them.
  • Nothing in language is immutably fixed: the best writers are constantly changing it. Absolute government by dictionary would mean the arrest of this healthy process of change and growth.
    • C. E. Montague, quoted in Elton, Oliver, ‘’C. E. Montague: A Memoir’’, London, Chatto & Windus, 1929. Also quoted in Murphy, Edward F., The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations, New York : Crown Publishers, 1978 (pg. 216).
  • Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinarb and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
  • Literature has something to do with language. There's probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what's on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you'll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren't a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of school-teachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage.
  • “Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings.”
    • Suman Pokhrel, Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika by Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018) Foreword.
  • “Language is texture of images and music. We speak in images and rhythm, by taking help of words.”
    • Suman Pokhrel, Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika by Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018) Foreword.
  • “Chance of source language influencing the target language and that of the translator intervening onto the style of original writer are major challenges in literary translation.”
    • Suman Pokhrel, Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika by Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018) Foreword.

Q - T

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  • Ebbinghaus: Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time.
Croce: Language is articulated, limited sound organized for the purpose of expression.
Dittrich: Language is the totality of expressive abilities of individual human beings and animals capable of being understood by at least one other individual.
Eisler: Language is any expression of experiences by a creature with a soul.
B. Erdmann: Language is not a kind of communication of ideas but a kind of thinking: stated or formulated thinking. Language is a tool, and in fact a tool or organ of thinking that is unique to us as human beings.
Forbes: Language is an ordered sequence of words by which a speaker expresses his thoughts with the intention of making them known to a hearer.
J. Harris: Words are the symbols of ideas both general and particular: of the general, primarily, essentially and immediately; of the particular, only secondarily, accidentally and mediately.
Hegel: Language is the act of theoretical intelligence in its true sense, for it is its outward expression.
Jespersen: Language is human activity which has the aim of communicating ideas and emotions.
Jodl: Verbal language is the ability of man to fashion, by means of combined tones and sounds based on a limited numbers of elements, the total stock of his perceptions and conceptions in this natural tone material in such a way that this psychological process is clear and comprehensible to others to its least detail.
Kainz: Language is a structure of signs, with the help of which the representation of ideas and facts may be effected, so that things that are not present, even things that are completely imperceptible to the senses, may be represented.
De Laguna: Speech is the great medium through which human co-operation is brought about.
Marty: Language is any intentional utterance of sounds as a sign of a psychic state.
Pillsbury-Meader: Language is a means or instrument for the communication of thought, including ideas and emotions.
De Saussure: Language is a system of signs expressive of ideas.
Schuchardt. The essence of language lies in communication.
Sapir: Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.
  • Geza Revesz, The Origins and Prehistory of Language, London 1956. Footnote at pp. 126-127
  • I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media.
  • …language is this medium that we hand back and forth between us in all human relationships all the time, it doesn't really have a privileged place. It's this coinage in which we keep trying to get a hold of each other or make ourselves clear.
    • Adrienne Rich Interview (1991) in Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose (1993)
  • Experience is always larger than language.
    • Adrienne Rich Interview (1991) in Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose (1993)
  • The politician manufactures a language - a vocabulary and a rhetoric - which, if you accept it as wholly adequate, leads inevitably to the answers he wants and to the actions he wants. But the prior question is whether the language is adequate to the facts. And as the poet is concerned with making language do new work and finding out the implications of language , his answer is always : no .
  • While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome
    • Jonathan Rosa Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2018)
  • …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.
    • Chava Rosenfarb Introduction (1971) to Exile At Last: Selected Poems (2013)
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, (1921), Harcourt, Brace, p. 213-4.
  • 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.
Bruce Wayne: Dick, I'm surprised at you! Language is the key to world peace. If we all spoke each other's tongues, perhaps the scourge of war would be ended forever.
Dick Grayon: Gosh, Bruce, yes. I'll get these darn verbs if they kill me!
  • Thou whoreson Zed! thou unnecessary letter!
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), Act II, scene 2, line 66.
  • You taught me language; and my profit on't
    Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
    For learning me your language!
    • William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610-1612), Act I, scene 2, line 363.
  • Fie, fie upon her!
    There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
    Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
    At every joint and motive of her body.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Knowledge belongs to the one who succeeds in mastering a language.
  • 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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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.

V - Z

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  • When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.
  • Verbing weirds language.
    • Bill Watterson, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection (1994), p. 53.
  • 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.
    • Peter Wehner, "The Joe Walsh Challenge," New York Times, 28 August 2019.
  • 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...
  • Speech is the best show a man puts on.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Gene Wolfe, "The Death of Doctor Island", Universe 3 (1973), ed. Terry Carr; reprinted in The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009).
  • 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.
    • Every age claims that its language is more endangered and threatened by decay than ever before. In our time, however, language is really endangered and threatened by decay as never before.
    • Hans Weigel, Die Leiden der jungen Wörter / The Sorrows of Young Words (1974), quoted by Rudi Keller Is the German Language Going to the Dogs? en, de
  • Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.
  • The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
  • 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
  • An entire mythology is stored within our language.
    • Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993) Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 133
  • 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.
    • Benjamin Whorf (1956), John B. Carroll (ed.), ed., Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, MIT Press pp. 212–214
  • 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.
    • Benjamin Whorf, (1956) John B. Carrol, (ed.), Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, MIT Press, p.244

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 426.

  • Well languag'd Danyel.
  • 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?
  • Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows
    Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.
  • “A language, like a species, when extinct, never… reappears.”
  • And don't confound the language of the nation
    With long-tailed words in osity and ation.
  • Language is the only instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.
  • We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s[emantic] r[eactions] and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us.
    • Alfred Korzybski,Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Lancaster, Pa.: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co., 1933) p. 90
  • L'accent du pays où l'on est né demeure dans l'esprit et dans le cœur comme dans le langage.
  • La grammaire, qui sait régenter jusqu'aux rois,
    Et les fait, la main haute, obéir à ses lois.
    • Grammar, which knows how to lord it over kings, and with high hands makes them obey its laws.
    • Molière, Les Femmes Savantes (1672), II. 6.
  • Une louange en grec est d'une merveilleuse efficace à la tête d'un livre.
    • A laudation in Greek is of marvellous efficacy on the title-page of a book.
    • Molière, Preface. Les Précieuses Ridicules.
  • L'accent est l'âme du discours, il lui donne le sentiment et la vérité.
  • 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
    • Sapir, Edward (1929), "The status of linguistics as a science", Language 5 (4): 207, doi:10.2307/409588
  • 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.
    • Sapir, Edward (1921), Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, Harcourt, Brace
  • Syllables govern the world.
  • Don Chaucer, well of English undefyled
    On Fame's eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.
  • "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.
  • 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.
  • Oft on the dappled turf at ease
    I sit, and play with similes,
    Loose type of things through all degrees.

See also

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