Thomas Paine Quotes

Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

Language is an art, like brewing or baking.... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

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.

The world's five thousand extant languages are products of our shared ability, but the five thousand cultures they create are separate from each other.

A language is a map of our failures

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.

I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it.

I definitely do see language serving its users, and when it no longer serves them we need to look for new words.

That which is communicated, i.e., understood, is metaphysical. The means of communication is physical.

Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times.

Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.

So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it's the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn't interested in any of those kinds of things.

I had always suspected language was quite limited in its ability to communicate the intricate mysteries of truth.