Amos Oz Quotes

Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.

From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.

Anything that is good influences the next thing. It's inevitable. I believe that Hollywood influences the comics, and the comics influence Hollywood - it's a cycle.

English has borrowed from everywhere and now goes everywhere.

English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

Miami is America’s most diverse city… We have 140 languages we speak..

Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.

Spanglish is the encounter: perhaps the word is marriage or divorce of English and Spanish, but also of Anglo and Hispanic civilizations - not only in the United States but in the entire continent and, perhaps, also in Spain.

New words travel from one variety of English to another and at a rapidly increasing rate, thanks to the way language is exchanged today over e-mail, chat rooms, TV, etc.

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

If it's one thing we learned from the first book, it's that you don't have to be a prizefighter, or a world-renowned architect, or a concert violinist to have been affected by the power of words.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words. (Act III, sc. I, 37-38)

The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.

Will America be the death of English? I'm glad I asked me that. My well-thought-out mature judgment is that it will.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.