44 Quotes About Languages-and-culture

MARAMIKHU（死後の世界、夢）ということばがある。死んだ人を思い眠る、その夢の中でのみ再びまみえる。そんな景色が浮かぶことば。ちなみにこの大アンダマン混成語の話者はゼロ。このことばを語るものはもうMARAMIKHUにしかいない。

In all the languages I speak, they say, ‘I fell in love.’ I always wondered why we have to fall if we are really loved. Why do we not stand in love? Why do we love someone to ‘death’ not to life? Perhaps the day we learn how to stand in language, we shall also be able to stand in love, to love our lovers to life, and to turn the language we speak from chains in our hands into wings to help us fly away from the prison we have built from it.

I was born on Ngurambang — can you hear it? — Ngu-ram-bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language — because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.

The dream: to know a foreign language yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity... to undo our own “reality” under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes... in a word, to descend into the untranslatable.

...they had just used the word hidoi, a Japanese adjective most often used to describe civil wars, natural disasters, or serial killers, and applied it to my shoes. The dress shoes I wore weren’t high-end or anything, but I’d like to think that hidoi was an exaggeration.

Chi non conosce le lingue straniere non conosce nulla della propria.

A man's most vivid emotional and sensuous experience is inevitably bound up with the language that he actually speaks. (New Bearings in English Poetry)

The Scots language is a mark of the distinctive identity of the Scottish people; and as such we should be concerned to preserve it, even if there were no other reason, because it is ours. This statement requires neither explanation nor apology.

Cada una de las lenguas europeas es rica, solo que su riqueza no se manifiesta sino en la descripción de su propia cultura, en la representación de su propio mundo. Sin embargo, cuando se intenta entrar en territorio de otra cultura, y describirla, la lengua desvela sus límites, su subdesarrollo, su impotencia semántica.