Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
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Samuel Beckett
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
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George Steiner
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.
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Unknown
More Quotes By Andrew Dalby
The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any wars, nor to have reduced the frequency with which wars...
On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.
It happens all too often - people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.
If two thousand five hundred languages are to be lost in the course of the twenty-first century, don’t be in any doubt about what that means for us: in each of those two thousand five hundreds cases a culture will be lost.
