Stephen Leacock Quotes

Zis and zat' when uttered by the French is considered charming, but 'dis and dat' as an Africanism is ridiculed as gross and ugly.

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's.

As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.

French and German illustrate the misleading character of apparent grammatical simplicity just as well.

All people in the world - who are not hermits or mutes - speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, "How are you" or "I'm not feeling well" all over the world. These common words - these common elements that we have between us - the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

Language, as we know, is full of illogicalities.

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

We must plow through the whole of language.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well.

Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.

All of us, just because we are able to talk, also believe we are able to talk about language.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

There are a lot of other things besides nouns.

Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

A dictionary can embrace only a small part of the vast tapestry of a language.

Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.