2,489 Quotes About Language

In the forbidden zone of interpretation, the tyranny of language becomes the poisoned-tip of the bureaucratic spear.

That statues are motionless would be true only if the earth were the universe.

Perhaps Welsh fairies stole children and confiscated their vowels.

Everything that man in the beginning heard, saw with his eyes, contemplated, and felt with his hands, was a living word. For God was the Word. With this Word in his mouth and in his heart, the origin of language was as natural, as near and easy, as child's play.

For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.

I spoke no Spanish, so I was unable to haggle with the taxi-drivers. 'Benengeli,' I said, and the first cabbie shook his head and walked away, spitting copiously. The second named a number that had no meaning for me. I had come to a place where I did not know the names of things or the motives for men's deeds. The universe was absurd. I could not say 'dog', or 'where?', or 'I am a man'. Besides, my head was thick, like a soup.

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.

Mathematics: The language of the mathematicians, by the mathematicians, for the mathematicians.

One can, of course, speak several languages. There are speakers who are competent in more than one language. Some even write several languages at a time (prostheses, grafts, translation, transposition) . But do they not always do it with a view to an absolute idiom? and in the promise of a still unheard-of language? of a sole poem previously inaudible?