Quotes About Language

Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, 'My language is perfect. It can do everything.' But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language-how we feel while programming.

The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.

The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and it's never the same as written.

Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.

Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents' verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don't speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

There is a narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate. Communication refers to an effort to get people to understand what one means. And that, certainly, is one use of language and a social use of it. But I don't think it is the only social use of language. Nor are social uses the only uses of language.

Since the boundary of the world of poetry is fluid, the language in it is also fluid. Hence, the language that is outside of the poetry world, namely the language that is not the language of poetry, cannot go into the poetry world.

Language is the primary way we communicate with each other, and we have really strong feelings about what words mean, and about good language and bad. Those things are really based on sort of an agglutination of half-remembered rules from high school or college, and our own personal views on language and the things we grew up saying, the things we grew up being told not to say.

We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.

So is not mathematical analysis then not just a vain game of the mind? To the physicist it can only give a convenient language; but isn't that a mediocre service, which after all we could have done without; and, it is not even to be feared that this artificial language be a veil, interposed between reality and the physicist's eye? Far from that, without this language most of the initimate analogies of things would forever have remained unknown to us; and we would never have had knowledge of the internal harmony of the world, which is, as we shall see, the only true objective reality.

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

Language is not a genetic gift, it is a social gift. Learning a new language is becoming a member of the club -the community of speakers of that language.

Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit--a language to use against these sparkling insects, these jets.

In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain.

It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. That is impossible. Not only would it make every experiment fruitless, but even if we wished to do so, it could not be done. Every man has his own conception of the world, and this he cannot so easily lay aside. We must, example, use language, and our language is necessarily steeped in preconceived ideas. Only they are unconscious preconceived ideas, which are a thousand times the most dangerous of all.

One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.

A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.

I grew up with a very quick temper, and the language of violence is a language that I'm very familiar and comfortable with.

Children must master the language of things before they master the language of words.

Of course, 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 ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.

I was wondering why I was put in prison for working in an African language when I had not been put in prison for working in English. So really, in prison I started thinking more seriously about the relation between language and power.

Originally when we talked about language disorder it was a catastrophic language disorder. It's substantial, and from a treatment standpoint it's okay to keep diluting that term, but from a research standpoint we need to be much more precise. I wish somebody would take up the mantle of just that particular task.

We Liberal Democrats believe in dialogue. We believe in cooperation with both sides of industry and between both sides of industry. And we believe in the language of cooperation. We reject the language of confrontation.

A woman who utters such disgusting and depressing noise has no right to be anywhere, no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech, that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible. Don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.

When we start making distinctions between soul and spirit, we're in very, very murky waters. There is the whole issue of the English language, which has a rather limited vocabulary when it comes to psychological descriptions, not to speak of spiritual descriptions. We're good mythically - the English language is superb for myth. But we're not very good for psychology or spirituality.

A basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape.

Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a chlld then,so I have only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity

I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn't bad... I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing. But it's become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.

The angels don't care what words you use. They appreciate the engraved, fancy prayers, but they say, "Just talk to us." You can use ordinary language - the language you use when you talk with your best friend - when you ask for help. If you want to reach out to the angels for something very personal for yourself, you can say, "Dear guardian angels and archangels, I ask that you come to me now and help me resolve this problem or issue." And then you just pour out your heart to the angels. You can do it silently in your mind. You can say it out loud. You can write it.

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it.... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.

To understand the Universe, you must understand the language in which it's written, the language of Mathematics.

For a while I felt like I spoke a different language than my immediate family. It wasn't until my teens that I met and got to know better members of my extended family (my cousin Alma in particular) that self- identified as artists. Something in us clicked together; in the way we thought, in the language we chose to use, in what we enjoyed. She helped me see and appreciate a lot both about myself and my loved ones.

The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

We like to pile language on language. Hunter [ S. Thompson] was an influence on me, no doubt about it.

I believe that any form of writing exercise is good for you. I also believe that any form of tuition which helps develop your awareness of the different properties, styles, and effects of writing is good for you. It helps you become a better reader, more sensitive to nuance, and a better writer, more sensitive to audience. Texting language is no different from other innovative forms of written expression that have emerged in the past. It is a type of language whose communicative strengths and weaknesses need to be appreciated.

paraphrasing.."Science is the language of the intellect of society. Art is language of the entire human personality.

The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.

The statement "I am in pain" may be one piece of evidence for the conclusion that the speaker is in pain, but it is not the only possible evidence, and since people sometimes tell lies, not even the best possible evidence. Even if there were stronger grounds for refusing to attribute pain to those who do not have language, the consequences of this refusal might lead us to reject the conclusion. Human infants and young children are unable to use language. Are we to deny that a year-old child can suffer?

The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.

I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.