Language Quotes - Page 34

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

I co-founded Duolingo with the mission of bringing free language education to the world.

If you can take photographs with language, I'm taking one right now.

If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning.

Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress--in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.

The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

Translation presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

The idea of morphology of languages is something that I'm really interested in.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English.

The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.

If we had the right words, if we had the language, we would need no weapons.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

English has more flexibility. It's a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural.

If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran. If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.