Languages And Culture Quotes

“Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, "I am sad," or "I am happy". They understood what we English have long forgot. We're not our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes.”
― Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Volume 1: Say You Want a Revolution

“The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Bet and Other Stories

“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)”
― F R Leavis

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
― Trevor Noah, Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Kitai blinked slowly. "Why would you use the same word for these things? That is ridiculous."
"We have a lot of words like that," Tavi said. "They can mean more than one thing."
"That is stupid," Kitai said. "It is difficult enough to communicate without making it more complicated with words that mean more than one thing.”
― Jim Butcher, Academ's Fury

“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.”
― J.Derrick McClure, Why Scots matters

“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.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun

“I didn’t bring you up to speak as if your mouth were filled with sewage.”
― Diane Samuels, Kindertransport: A Drama

“At hearing the news, he unsuccessfully tried to stop himself from being happy. He wondered how it happened that his average grades and middling job experience were somehow deemed weightier than genuine life skills--Renato's naked ambition, Angela's people skills, Vincent's quick thinking, Imaculada's grit--only because he articulated them better, just because he had the English nouns and verbs, the necessary tongue and lip placements, to say, 'I have made these myself. Listen.”
― Glenn Diaz, The Quiet Ones

“Language by its very nature is naive,we make it complex and naughty. We make it look and sound like what it is not.”
― Nahiyan bin Asadullah

“The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.”
― Leonard Bloomfield, An introduction to the study of language

“The way people want to get respect for their culture and language, it is critical to reciprocate the same to other else you don't have any right to condemn others.”
― Pankaj Gupta

“English is the language through which I reach hearts from various corners of the world. English is the language through which I flirt with my species. English is the language through which I make my species think.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Human Making is Our Mission: A Treatise on Parenting

“Is It True?
English is a really a form of Plattdeutsch or Lowland German, the way it was spoken during the 5th century. It all happened when Germanic invaders crossed the English Channel and the North Sea from northwest Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia to what is now Scotland or Anglo Saxon better identified as Anglo-Celtic. English was also influenced by the conquering Normans who came from what is now France and whose language was Old Norman, which became Anglo-Norman.
Christianity solidified the English language, when the King James Version of the Bible was repetitively transcribed by diligent Catholic monks. Old English was very complex, where nouns had three genders with der, die and das denoting the male, female and neuter genders. Oh yes, it also had strong and weak verbs, little understood and most often ignored by the masses.
In Germany these grammatical rules survive to this day, whereas in Britain the rules became simplified and der, die and das became da, later refined to the article the! It is interesting where our words came from, many of which can be traced to their early roots. “History” started out as his story and when a “Brontosaurus Steak” was offered to a cave man, he uttered me eat! Which has now become meat and of course, when our cave man ventured to the beach and asked his friend if he saw any food, the friend replied “me see food,” referring to the multitude of fish or seafood! Most English swear words, which Goodreads will definitely not allow me to write, are also of early Anglo-Saxon origin. Either way they obeyed their king to multiply and had a fling, with the result being that we now have 7.6 Billion people on Earth.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One...."

“Adiós. A Dios. To God. From God. De Dios. Dedos. My fingers waving. Good-bye.”
― Chris Campanioni, Going Down

“Nu limba, legile, obiceiurile sau principiile despart sau unesc ființele, ci felul identic în care țin cuțitul și furculița.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“If Bengali is my mother, then English is my father and friend.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Human Making is Our Mission: A Treatise on Parenting

“Learning English was like lifting a veil, one which would be, he'd learn, impossible to fully restore.”
― Glenn Diaz, The Quiet Ones