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Languages Quotes

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Languages Quotes

“Behind these practical studies lay powerful, intertwined, and potentially contradictory beliefs: that language provides a key to the rational, scientific understanding of the world and that language is more than human speech, that it claims a divine origin and is the means by which God created the cosmos and Adam named the beasts. As we will see, both ideas strongly influenced the Inklings, whose leading members wrote many words about the meaning of words. For Owen Barfield, language is the fossil record of the history and evolution of human consciousness; for C. S. Lewis, it is a mundane tool that "exists to communicate whatever it can communicate" but also, as in That Hideous Strength, an essential part of our metaphysical makeup for good or ill; for Charles Williams, language is power, a field of force for the magician, a vehicle of prayer for the believing Christian; for Tolkien, language is a fallen human instrument and a precious divine gift ("O felix peccatum Babel!" he exclaimed in his essay "English and Welsh"), a supreme art, and, as "Word", a name for God.”

LanguagesInklings
Book:The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
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“Vin paused. "And you have all of these religions memorized?" "As much as is possible," Sazed said. "Their prayers, their beliefs, their mythologies. Many are very similar -- break-offs or sects of one another." "Even still, how can you remember all of that?" "I have...methods," Sazed said. "But, what's the point?" Sazed frowned. "The answer should be obvious, I think. People are valuable, Mistress Vin, and so--therefore--are their beliefs.”

PeopleLoveReligionHumanityBeliefLanguagesMistbornThe Final Empire
Book:Mistborn: The Final Empire
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“Linguistic diversity is integral to the cultural diversity that ensures some humans will survive in the event of one of the periodic global catastrophes. Local indigenous languages hold the keys to to survival because they contain the nouns, the names of the plants, insects, birds and mammals important locally to human survival.”

KnowledgeSurvivalLinguisticsCultural DiversityLanguagesLinguistic DiversityHuman SurvivalIndigenous Languages
Book:The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir
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“New York was like the internet before the internet. A densely populated, hectic, ever-evolving place that’s always on, that you extract yourself from in order to rest, to catch your breath, and will be there in full force when you’re ready for it again. The city that never sleeps. Interconnected in a grand plexus by a series of subnetworks and subsystems. Shiny parts and seedy parts. Covered in ads, understated and overstated. Multicultural. Everybody’s here, every language is spoken. The anonymous mistaken for the rude: people here get away with saying how they feel, speaking their truths.”

TruthNew YorkAdvertisingMulticulturalismAnalogiesAnonymityRudenessNycLanguagesThe Internet
Book:In Limbo
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“It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that "legends" depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the "legends" which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa. Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &C. are dead, for deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.). (letter 180)”

LanguageLanguagesLanguages And CultureLanguages And Cultures
Book:The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
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“That so far the material has been dealt with in a rather subjective way provokes the question whether a means can be found of handling it objectively. [...] This chapter considers the applicability of the statistical tests employed by Wilson and the general problem whether the Linear B data are suited to statistical analysis.”

StatisticsLanguagesPhilologyStatistical AnalysisDeciphermentLinear BMycenology
Book:Place-Names in the Knossos Tablets Identification and Location
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“What will endure, I hope, is the idea of Rotwelsch, the idea that marginalized groups develop special languages as tools for survival. We often think of such groups in terms of ethnic identity, but the identity of Rotwelsch speakers was defined by being outside the order of settled society, period. From this position as complete outsiders, they forged an identity by borrowing from the languages around them, with astonishing resilience and inventiveness. Having been cast out from society, they created an idiom that expressed their hard-earned wisdom, their willingness to live differently, and their sheer will to survive.”

IdentityResilienceLinguisticsLanguagesItinerantRotwelsch
Book:The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate
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“The hardest foreign language you will ever learn is your first one. And the second hardest foreign language you will ever learn is your second one. In other words, language learning gets easier with each subsequent iteration. This phenomenon owes to the fact that languages, especially those belonging to the same family, share a great deal in terms of grammar, syntax, phonetics, and vocabulary. . . Not only are many of the concepts repetitive across languages, but learners become more adept at recognizing patterns, formulating sentences, and memorizing information.”

Language LearningPolyglotLanguagesLinguistForeign Languages
Book:The Art of Learning a Foreign Language: 25 Things I Wish They Told Me
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