Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.

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.

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

In every art form, nothing exists in a bubble. It exists because of what came before it. A lot of bricks were laid. I think if it weren't for 'The Purge,' 'Get Out' wouldn't resonate as a mainstream movie. You push on the taste of the audience, in a way, get them used to something, and then you keep pushing on it.

A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"

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

The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.

By county, there's like 14 different accents in Mississippi alone. And now, present day, a Mississippi accent is different than in 1963. So we had a dialect coach, which is like going to visit France and having to translate all your emotions into French, and French isn't your first language. I had to go through that filter, so it was interesting.

Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

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

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

What I've learned about that word is context, where the world is coming from - in the era the film is set, it obviously is used derogatorily. In 'Selma,' it was the same sort of thing. Of course now, in music, it's used in many more ways, including ways that takes the sting out of it. It all depends on where and when it is used, and how you look at it. But again in 'Race,' it is intensely disrespectful.

And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words.

We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.

The biblical authors wrote of God's sovereignty over His world, and of man's experiences within that world, using such modes of speech about the natural order and human experience as were current in their days, and in a language that was common to themselves and their contemporaries. This is saying no more than that they wrote to be understood. Their picture of the world and things in it is not put forward as normative for later science, andy more than their use of Hebrew and Greek is put forward as a perfect model for composition in these languages.

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

I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

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