quotations about language
If the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now -- well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.
MAX VENTILLA
"Learn Different: Silicon Valley disrupts education", The New Yorker, March 7, 2016
Language is a living original; it is not made but grows. The growth of language repeats the growth of the plant; at first it is only root, next it puts forth a stem, then leaves, and finally blossoms.
WILLIAM SWINTON
Rambles Among Words: Their Poetry, History and Wisdom
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People?
Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.
GENE WOLFE
"The Death of Doctor Island", Universe 3
Men are apt to overvalue the tongues, and to think they have made considerable progress in learning when they have once overcome these; yet in reality there is no internal worth in them, and men may understand a thousand languages without being the wiser.
E. D. BAKER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Wouldn't it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the nuisance of communicating in a different language?... Within a decade or so, we'll be able to communicate with one another via small earpieces with built-in microphones. No more trying to remember your high school French when checking into a hotel in Paris. Your earpiece will automatically translate "Good evening, I have a reservation" to Bon soir, j'ai une réservation -- while immediately translating the receptionist's unintelligible babble to "I am sorry, Sir, but your credit card has been declined."
DAVID ARBESÚ
"Could the language barrier actually fall within the next 10 years?", The Conversation, March 28, 2016
Language, which is the uniting bond and very medium of communion between men, is at the same time by the great variety of tongues, the means of severing and estranging nations more than anything else.
HORACE SMITH
The Tin Trumpet: Or, Heads and Tails, for the Wise and Waggish
All true language is incomprehensible, Like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Ci-Git
It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Language is not a wonderful natural asset; it is an artificial device that constantly misleads us and does us great harm; and the modern way of studying language is itself harmful because it enhances the reputation of language and sustains corrupt ways of thought.
AMOREY GETHIN
introduction, Language and Thought: A Rational Enquiry Into Their Nature and Relationship
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus
A man reacheth not to excellence with one language.
R. ASCHAM
attributed, Day's Collacon
In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned.
RICHARD DUPPA
Maxims
Language is originally and essentially nothing but a system of signs or symbols, which denote real occurrences, or their echo in the human soul.
CARL JUNG
Psychology of the Unconscious
To clothe low-creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy but flat foolery; it rather loads than raises a wren, to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings.
THOMAS FULLER
The Holy State and the Profane State
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
GEORGE ORWELL
1984
It is a silly conceit, that men without languages are often without understanding; it is apparent in all ages, that some such have been even prodigies for ability; for it is not to be believed that wisdom speaks only to her disciples in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
THOMAS FULLER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Language was invented for one reason, boys -- to woo women.
N. H. KLEINBAUM
Dead Poets Society
There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind