Quotes About Language

When you speak a foreign language, you become someone else. If you aren't used to speaking a language, and you start speaking it again, for the first few sentences you'll find yourself in very strange shape, because you're still the person who was speaking the first language. But if you keep speaking that language, you will become the person who corresponds to it.

Language is decanted and shared. If only one person is left alive speaking a language - the case with some American Indian languages - the language is dead. Language takes two and their multiples.

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.

Religion is much more than language, but to be Christian does mean speaking Christian for most people. The language many of us use has contributed to the crisis in Christianity in North America. Traditional Christian language is becoming less familiar to millions of people. The language is frequently misunderstood by people.

One of the reasons I love language is that concerning semiotics, language is an arbitrary sign system, which means the signs within it are free-floating, but we put them in a certain order to get them to have meaning for us. If we left them alone, they'd be like water, like the ocean. It would be just this vast field of free-floating matter or signs, so in this way, I think language and water have much in common. It's only us bringing grammar and syntax and diction and the human need for meaning that orders language, hierarchizes it.

Rather than thinking of sound and sense in my essays as two opposing principles, two perpendicular trajectories, as they are often considered in conversations around translation, or even as two disassociated phenomena that can be brought together to collaborate with more or less success, I think of sound as sense. Sound has its own meaning, and it's one of the many non-semantic dimensions of meaning in language. I want to emphasize is the formal dynamic between language-as-information and language-as-art-material.

The establishment of formal standards for proofs about programs... and the proposal that the semantics of a programming language may be defined independently of all processors for that language, by establishing standards of rigor for proofs about programs in the language, appears to be novel.

Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of Díaz Casanueva; in that language in which Joaquín Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!

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

I never taught language for the purpose of teaching it; but invariably used language as a medium for the communication of thought; thus the learning of language was coincident with the acquisition of knowledge.

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.

One of my favorite literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote that the defining characteristic of the novel is its unprecedented level of "heteroglossia" - the way it brings together so many different registers of language. He doesn't mean national languages, but rather the sublanguages we all navigate between every day: high language, low language, everything. I think there's something really powerful about the idea of the novel as a space that can bring all these languages together - not just aggregate them, like the Internet is so good at doing, but bring them into a dialogue.

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.

English was my fourth language. I arrived, I enrolled in public school, as a child, I believe I was about six years old when we finally landed in Michigan. And I was initially put in special education because I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the English language because I was listening to Hungarian and Albanian and German. My mind broke down like I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the fourth language.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, it's plenitude.

To stop challenging someone from using anti-gay language simply because they persist in using anti-gay language strikes me as a defeatist approach.

I believe it is essential to have English as the official language of our National Government, for the English language is the tie that binds the millions of immigrants who come to America from divergent backgrounds. We should, and do, encourage immigrants to maintain and share their traditions, customs and religions, but the use of English is essential for immigrants and their children to participate fully in American society and achieve the American dream.

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.

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

The funny thing is, nationalism only could have come about in Europe after the invention of printing. You could have this thing that was a book in a vernacular language, and you could imagine there were other readers of this book who you couldn't see, but they were a theoretical union of readers who all use the same language. That is kind of a prerequisite for a national fantasy. You need that thing, and it's a strange thing.

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

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

It is not the responsibility of the language to force good looking code, but the language should make good looking code possible.

I make the case in the book that Standard English, that language we all aspire to live and move and have our being within, is actually based on a fiction. It's not anyone's native way of speaking or writing. That's why we have to take classes in it. Language is just really squishy.

When you choose a language, youre also choosing a community. The programmers youll be able to hire to work on a Java project wont be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

My earliest memory is having my grandfather, who was born in 1899, read the newspaper to me in a foreign language. I was utterly captivated by the fact that he took the time to read it to me. I didn't know what he saying, it was in a completely different language. I think it was in French. But I was just so honored that he was with me and talking to me. It's extraordinary that you know someone from that time, and also someone that's willing to give you the time of day, who's lived through so much.

Speak the language of high intelligence, and thus you speak the language of God.

I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.

Between France and Senegal there's a history. There's a language that we both speak. There's a culture that we share and to which both of our peoples have contributed. But beyond our history, beyond our language, beyond the links that have united us for so long, what unites us today is the future.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

I don't believe in that country any longer. I'm not interested. I'm writing in the language, and I like the language.

There is no doubt about it: we are judged by our language as much as (perhaps more than) we are judged by our appearance, our choice of associates, our behavior. Language communicates so much more than ideas; it reveals our intelligence, our knowledge of a topic, our creativity, our ability to think, our self-confidence, et cetera.

America is our continent. You feel in the daily language that Americans use the word "America" to erase the rest of the continent from the map. And, of course, the language is clearly a reflection of the geopolitical reality: the domination of the United States over the rest of the continent.

Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.

Those who become hyperpolyglots are those who meet two criteria. One, they are exposed to language material. Two, they undertake learning languages as a mission as well as acquiring the personal identity as a language learner.I describe the "neural tribe theory" of hyperpolyglots, arguing that they possess an atypical neurology that is selected by some environments and not others; presumably, there have always been humans walking around with that set of neurological traits or factors, only some of whom actually use those things for languages.

We have room but for one Language here and that is the English Language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house.

I did not say that language as a completed system emerged in an individual in an instant. But I cannot think of a coherent alternative to the idea that mutations take place in individuals, not communities, so that whatever rewiring of the brain yielded the apparently unique properties of language, specifically recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions, would therefore have taken place in an individual, and only later been used among individuals who had inherited this capacity.

The first time I went to Mexico, it was really difficult. Number one is the language, I didn't know any Spanish language. Of course, the culture itself. Very different from where I grew up.

If we have listening ears, God speaks to us in our own language, whatever that language be

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

Language would have evolved first as an internal object, a kind of "language of thought" (LOT), with externalisation (hence communication) an ancillary process. I can't review here the strong and growing evidence to support this conclusion, but I have elsewhere. There are ample reasons why having a LOT would confer selectional advantage: the person so endowed could plan, interpret, reflect, etc., in ways denied to others.

[Barack] Obama has a grasp of language and the presentation of language, particularly in times of crisis. And he did this over the race issue. He did this early on in his administration, when the country was polarized. That was unprecedented.

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.

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you.