Gilbert Highet Quotes

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.

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

Words aren't made — they grow,' said Anne.

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.

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

Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences. 828

To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

There isn't much doubt that like other animal societies, those of Homo sapiens involved plenty of cooperation, which might have been considerably enhanced, one would suppose, by the emergence of the remarkable instrument of language.

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)

It's commonly assumed that the emergence of language was a key element of the great leap. We of course know very little about the sociopolitical conditions that existed at the time, but there's no scenario I can think of that suggests how a sudden change in these conditions could have led to the emergence of language.

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

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.

While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

It is by metaphor that language grows.

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.

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

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

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

Samskrit is the unsurpassed zenith in the whole development of languages yet known to us.

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. "I hate this language. It changes too often!