Language Quotes - Page 84

We are spectacular splendid manifestations of life. We have language. We have affection. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.

Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!

The space station mission was kind of the culmination of all of my experience of being a NASA Astronaut, so it had brought all of my previous experience into play. I had to learn the Russian language to a fluent level so that I could function as the co-pilot of the Soyuz Spacecraft that we flew up and back from the space station. And then the challenge of being the Commander of the whole expedition, a six and a-half month flight aboard the international space station. I felt the burden of the whole mission on my shoulders, which was fine, and fortunately everything did go well.

History is more interesting than politics.

I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.

The dictionary has been in the making for several decades, and the result is well worth the wait. MacLean and those who worked with her have consulted with Iñupiaq speakers from across Alaska's North Slope to compile a comprehensive collection of word stems, along with postbases, grammatical endings, and an array of other valuable material. . . . This dictionary will prove fascinating for anyone interested in the Iñupiat and their language.

The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours."

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.

Human languages tend to be much more ambiguous than computer languages because humans are much smarter about interpreting the context.

Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory.

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

The grammar of a language is simply the way it combines smaller elements (such as words) into larger elements (such as sentences).

Let's not become so worried about not offending anybody that we lose the ability to distinguish between respect and paranoia.

Music is indeed the Universal Language.

I know what the structure of the language is.

French is a foreign language, but I've been speaking it since I was 18 so it's second nature to me.

Someone gave me the Love Languages book, and that has been the best book I've ever read about relationships and has helped me the most.