Kenneth L. Pike Quotes

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

You couldn't have human society without language.

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community.

I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.

Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution.

I was always influenced by language.

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.

... politics of meaning

Language turned apes like us into civil creatures.

The development of language is part of the development of the personality, for words are the natural means of expressing thoughts and establishing understanding between people.

Latin is beautiful and has become something of an international language, but there is also something about singing in your native language that has meaning.

As you grow, you learn and talk about different things.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises