2,489 Quotes About Language
- Author Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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We can know, not what a thing is, but what its name is.
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- Author George Steiner (Author) by John Steiner (Author)
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There is also a reassuring modesty in more recent claims made for a ‘theory of translation.’ After Babel tries to show that there cannot, in any strict or responsible sense, be any such ‘theory.’ The cerebral proceedings which would have to underlie and explain it are simply inaccessible. At best, we have narratives of translational praxis." - George Steiner in the Preface to the third edition of 'After Babel'.
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- Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time -- to start thinking in terms of projects.
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- Author Natasha Pulley
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But Spanish and English aren't different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It's almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language unrelated to English is nothing to do with equivalent words. Whenever I'd tried to do that in Chinese I'd come out with unbroken nonsense. I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh.
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- Author Steven Pinker
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As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.
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- Author John McWhorter
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People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.
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- Author Yuval Noah Harari
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Why is English so widespread today, and not Danish?
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- Author Noam Chomsky
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If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.
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- Author David Hume
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Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.
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