Language Quotes
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It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.
The spirit of logical analysis should in practice blend with the practical pressure for the adoption of some form of international language, but it should not allow itself to be stampeded by it.
We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
A common creation demands a common sacrifice, and perhaps not the least potent argument in favour of a constructed international language is the fact that it is equally foreign, or apparently so, to the traditions of all nationalities.
Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit.
English, once accepted as an international language, is no more secure than French has proved to be as the one and only accepted language of diplomacy or as Latin has proved to be as the international language of science.
In a sense, every form of expression is imposed upon one by social factors, one's own language above all.
It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.
No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.
So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure.
The attitude of independence toward a constructed language which all national speakers must adopt is really a great advantage, because it tends to make man see himself as the master of language instead of its obedient servant.
The psychology of a language which, in one way or another, is imposed upon one because of factors beyond one's control, is very different from the psychology of a language which one accepts of one's free will.
The supposed inferiority of a constructed language to a national one on the score of richness of connotation is, of course, no criticism of the idea of a constructed language.
The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.
My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned 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.
It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.
Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.
I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
Fashion is a language. Some know it, some learn it, some never will - like an instinct.
Every different director has another language - for instance, Hitchcock does not like any bright color ever, unless the story says 'there goes the girl in a red dress.'
The natural world is often bleak, but the language devoted to it is as careful as needlepoint and prophetic as well.
To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing.
I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.
I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.
As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power.
It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish.
If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
'Station to Station' came out of a sense of urgency - a sense that culture, be it art, film or architecture, has become so compartmentalised. For this project, we wanted to break that and create a language that is more nomadic and less materialistic and really empowering for the creators and the audience.
I watched a lot of Jerry Rice's film just to learn how to run routes, but it was so difficult to imitate him, and he didn't play with the same body language that I wanted to play with.
Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.
Reading to babies creates such a special parent-child bond and so strongly influences a child's language skills that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that doctors and nurses routinely discuss it with parents during pediatric visits.
Of my English friends, I should find language too poor to speak the just praise and the excellence which shines in their characters and lives.
The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution.
I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.
I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
Some people accuse the new generation of being ignorant, maybe ignorant for the old generation, but it's a new language.
The radio was my big influence. Comedy came from the instinctual feel I had for language.
I've had a fair amount of experience with snakes, and I find them to be pretty honest in terms of how you read their body language and emotions. They'll tell you when they're grumpy. They'll tell you when they're okay.
When the media's around, I try to be careful. I don't want to make a mistake or use bad language, and I have to really concentrate because of the language barrier.
It doesn't matter to me where am I going. Language is not a barrier for me, I can go anywhere with my craft, so why not Hollywood?
The good thing about not speaking the language is you just listen. You listen to everyone, every producer, every writer.
I usually just speak in English when I'm on the basketball court. For some reason, my mind never even tried to cross any other language when I'm playing basketball.
I came up with new leads for game stories by being observant and clever, by using the many gifts of the English language to intrigue and hook a reader.
I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.
Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
I learned just recently, in fact, that a lot of people who read do not form a visual image from what they're reading. They just don't. They follow the events and get the resonance with the language, but they have only a vague, general idea of what the characters look like.
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have a metrical direction is because that's the shape of the language. I didn't make that shape.
The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.
The first phase of C was - really, it was two phases in short succession of, first, some language changes from B, really adding the type structure without too much change in the syntax, and doing the compiler. The second phase was slower; it all took place within a very few years, but it was a bit slower, so it seemed.
I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts.
Physical expression was my first language: Before I was an actor, I was a dancer, an acrobat, a mime and a street performer.
I got my dog back, in African-American language, your dog means your passion, your fire.
Ability to speak the majority language is not just important for inclusion; it is important for minorities to be able to claim their rights and entitlements.
The problem with Muslim women is less that we cannot speak the language, but that no one listens to us.
For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.
We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.
I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.
One of the first studies in the field of gender and language, by Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West in 1975, found that in casual conversations between women and men, women were interrupted far more often.
One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'
The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.
I don't want to be embarrassed when I go to see something on the screen. I don't want to listen to foul language, watch a lot of violence or see something immoral. I prefer stories with sensitivity and family values; films that strive to lift you up to a higher place in life.
Body language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently, 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words.
Appropriation was the language of my generation in many ways. It came out of Duchamp, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein.
We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from.
Visual storytelling utilizes both language and art to pass on the essence of who we are.
To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.
Though music transcends language, culture and time, and though notes are the same, Indian music is unique because it is evolved, sophisticated and melodies are defined.
Mama had her little cough. Once or twice, some quiet sobbing, out of sight... Or the slamming of kitchen cupboard doors. That was her language.
The Constitution is no simple contract, not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language, but because its language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, altogether, all at once.
For those whose exclusive norm of constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, 'Brown' must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision.
The language of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be very hard to say that the obvious facts on which 'Plessy' was based had changed.
I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.
From the earliest moments of life, children begin to learn the fundamentals of language. The most powerful influence for effective language development are the verbal interactions with caregivers.
I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.
Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.
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