Adrienne Rich Quotes

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?

Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art.

Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.

The ways in which language changes never ceases to interest me.

When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved.

There's so much that we just accept, but the reasons behind how certain rules came to be are so fascinating and funny, it just increases your affection for language.

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west.

Some changes of language are to be regretted, as they lead to false inferences, and society is always a loser by mistaking names for things.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.

The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.

First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.