872 quotes found
“I refuse to be linguistically constrained by dictionary writers.”
“Language was just that thing that happened when you opened your mouth at the table, squeezed a few noises out of your vocal chords, and induced Socrates thereby to pass the salt.”
“Those who live only in the universal temporality can make their voices heard by the world. Those who simultaneously live in the universal and particular temporalities may hear voices from the other...”
“Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an ...”
“A related notion is that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesn't think in any language. What people refer to as "thinking in a language" comes from being able t...”
“Why are there more male hyperpolyglots? One answer is that speaking a lot of languages is a geek macho thing (...) It seemed that a woman is less likely to say she "speaks" or "knows" a language if...”
“Possible explanations for talented language learning fall into two general areas. One view says: What matters is a person's sense of mission and dedication to language learning. You don't need to d...”
“One difference is that individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet h...”
“In English we blame others for not understanding us when really it's our fault for not saying what we wanted to say.”
“Most of the people who have verbally asserted that there is no master of pronounciation have intentionally made a claim and unintentionally made their claim believable. (It is pro-nun-ciation not p...”
“One of the first things to understand was how people knew what language to speak to whom. Where I've lived in the American Southwest, choosing to speak English or Spanish based on how someone looks...”
“Holding the lamb in his arms, Jesus watched the people file past, some coming, some going, some carrying animals to be sacrificed, some returning without them, looking joyful and exclaiming, Allelu...”
“Every man who knows anything of languages, knows that it is impossible to translate from one language into another, not only without losing a great part of the original, but frequently of mistaking...”
“All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mindthe culturehas two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the co...”
“Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual hist...”
“You are the language so universalyou are forgottenBe my linguistTurn meinto your words.”
“Perhaps that's why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place : the self consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distan...”
“Your first love is like your first language. No matter how many other languages you learn to speak, you can never be as good as in your first.”
“Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking.”
“Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-p...”
