Language is what we use to tell stories, transmit knowledge, and build social bonds. It comforts, tickles, excites, and destroys. Every society has language, and somehow we all learn a language in the first few years of our lives, a process that has been repeated for as long as humans have been around. Unlike swimming, using Microsoft Windows, or making the perfect lemon souffle – which some of us never manage to do – learning a language is a task we can all take for granted. . Charles Yang
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 Charles Yang
So is language change progress or degeneration? It is neither, of course. To assert that language change is for the better or worse requires some measure of what "good" or "bad" language is, and the issue of language change needn't come into question here. But...
The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it does involve an extra step, but even that isn't all...
Universal grammar is about what language is: it is to be distinguished from prescriptive grammars, often distilled in newspaper columns, which tell us what language should be. We are all entitled to our own opinions of what is appropriate, be it in the arrangement of...
Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the child's environment. And fitness, because we have competition, can be...
Is language actually getting better, shorter, and easier? Nowadays we often hear exactly the opposite. Teenager slang is awful, students no longer learn Latin, our children – not to mention our president – cannot put together a grammatical sentence. The whimsical poet Ogden Nash was...
