Ursula Dubosarsky Quotes

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.

Japanese people have a funny habit of abbreviating names.

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

Science is a progressive activity. The outstanding peculiarity of man is that he stumbled onto the possibility of progressive activities. Such progress, the accumulation of experience from generation to generation, depended first on the development of language, then of writing and finally of printing. These allowed the accumulation of tradition and of knowledge, of the whole aura of cultural inheritance that surrounds us. This has so conditioned our existence that it is almost impossible for us to stop and examine the nature of our culture. We accept it as we accept the air we breathe; we are as unconscious of our culture as a fish, presumably, is of water.

Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.

One of the joys of language is its constant evolution, and a lexicographer's job is both to track new words and to reassess those from the past.

I wonder if, as a society, we will ever be able to call someone a jive tofurkey.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

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

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

We must plow through the whole of language.

Will America be the death of English? I'm glad I asked me that. My well-thought-out mature judgment is that it will.

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

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

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

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

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.

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

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.

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

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

Unlikely things to see in a Valentine's card - "I may be dyslexic but that doesn't mean I don't vole you."