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21 " Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time to solve the dilemma and prevent people from engaging, a few years hence, in bitter and fruitless linguistic conflicts. We know all too well what time will do.The only possible answer is a voluntary policy aimed at strengthening linguistic diversity and based on a simple idea: nowadays everybody obviously needs three languages. The first is his language of identity; the third is English. Between the two we have to promote a third language, freely chosen, which will often but not always be another European language. This will be for everyone the main foreign language taught at school, but it will also be much more than that--the language of the heart, the adopted language, the language you have married, the language you love. "
― Amin Maalouf , الهويات القاتلة
22 " Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this. "
― José Saramago , The Cave
23 " Simplicity may be simple, but like complexity it requires linguistic precision, and may therefore call for relatively obscure expressions at times. "
24 " Human spoken language seems to beadventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities. "
― Carl Sagan , Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
25 " One difference is that individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brain power (...) For multilinguals, learning languages is an act of joining society. There's no motive, no separable 'will to plasticity' that's distinct from what it means to be a part of that society. Being a hyperpolyglot means exactly the opposite. The hyperpolyglot's pursuit of many languages may be a bridge to the rest of the world, but it walls him off from his immediate language community. "
― Michael Erard , Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
26 " For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards. "
― John Mole , It's All Greek to Me!: A Tale of a Mad Dog and an Englishman, Ruins, Retsina--and Real Greeks
27 " Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born. "
― Aldous Huxley
28 " The linguistic system represented in the mind-brain gives some account of everything submitted to it: good sentences, bad sentences, sentences in other languages, ums and ahs, coughs; perhaps -Chomsky suggests- even to non-linguistic events like a squeaking door. "
― , Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals
29 " 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 measured by the compatibility of a grammar with what a child hears in a particular linguistic environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes. "
― , The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
30 " For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe their new discoveries form a giant growing lexicon that means English is simply bursting with new possibilities, resembling the Elizabethan age in that respect. Then conceptually, science is creating new stories to tell, by deluging us with new information and potentialities. In this deluge we need art to do its usual job of sorting things out, by giving things their human dimension and by exploring how they might feel and what they might mean. So to me the arts and the sciences are completely intertwined. Maybe that's always been true, but now more than ever. "
― Kim Stanley Robinson
31 " Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: " Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112)They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity? "
32 " The polyglot is a linguistic nomad. "
― Rosi Braidotti , Nomadic Subjects
33 " We believe that information is an enlightening agent, but I can assure you it is not. We consume information, but we can’t read. We forgot how to sit down and engage the dense layers of a text. We are so busy devouring information that we forgot how to dance with ideas. We confuse linguistic bits of data for knowledge and ideas. I can assure you, gentlemen, they are not the same. Ideas require effort and the kind of sensibility that engages the subtle layers of meaning. What the hell does information require? "
― , Notes from the Cafe
34 " ...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional “victims” who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime. "
― Gad Saad
35 " Hey dawg, wassup?" he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as the lisp that everybody in medieval Spain had to adopt after the king developed a speech impediment. "
36 " Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions. "
― S.I. Hayakawa , Language in Action
37 " The fact of English supremacy is something most native speakers of English unknowingly suppress, all the while enjoying the privileges that come with it. Many non-English-speaking populations, however, cannot afford to suppress that fact but are forced to face it in one way or another, though their writers generally turn their backs on the linguistic asymmetry lest they end up too discouraged to write, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. "
― Minae Mizumura , The Fall of Language in the Age of English
38 " There is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. 'What disturbs and alarms man,' said Epictetus, 'are not the things, but his opinions and fantasies about the things. "
― Ernst Cassirer , An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture
39 " The part of thinking that’s easy to handle is the part that works by analogy with speech. Thinking in words, speaking our thoughts internally, projects an auditorium inside our skulls. Dark or bright, a shadow theater or a stage scorched by klieg lights, here we try out voices, including the voice we have settled on as the familiar sound of our identity, although it may not be what other people hear when we speak aloud. But that is the topmost of the linguistic processes going on in the mind. Beneath the auditorium runs a continuous river of thought that not only is soundless but is not ordered so it can be spoken. For obvious reasons, describing it is difficult. If I dip experimentally into the wordless flow, and then try to recall the sensations of it, I have the impression of a state in which grammar is present – for when I think like this I am certainly construing lucid relationships between different kinds of meaning, and making sense of the world by distinguishing between (for a start) objects and actions – but thought there are so to speak nounlike and verblike concentrations in the flow, I do not solidify them, I do not break them off into word-sized units. Are there pictures? Yes, but I am not watching a slide show, the images do not come in units either. Sometimes there’s a visual turbulence – rapid, tumbling, propelled – that doesn’t resolve into anything like the outlines of separate images. Sometimes one image, like a key, will hold steady while a whole train of wordless thoughts flows from its start to its finish. A mountain. A closed box. A rusty hinge. "
― Francis Spufford , The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading
40 " It is about time that, atheist or no, we call a spade a spade, and outed lies, and suspicious statements are placed against the backdrop of a linguistic litmus test. "
― Leviak B. Kelly , The Leprechaun Delusion