James Nicoll Quotes

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.

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

English has borrowed from everywhere and now goes everywhere.

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.

English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.

Everyone tells me I have a funny accent. It's because I copy people. I learned English at school but have best friends who are French, Australian, English and American; a very weird mix.

I speak English. I dream in it. I cannot separate my English from my Shona; I see the world with those two languages.

From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

Every language has influences and is an influence.

I work in Hebrew. Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages. Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English. The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages. Every language has influences and is an influence.

An ear will never do you wrong, but I know writers who... most of the language they use is just extracted language from other languages they've read. I am a big-time reader, but I mix and match.

The words you can't find, you borrow.

In Dortmund we had many players from abroad and when you want to put your thoughts in their heads, for example with Pierre-Emerick, you had to switch to English, which is the language most players understand.

I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.

My English is improving because I learnt it in one year at Leicester, before it was just in school and on holiday, but I have to learn more, I don't understand it all.

I can speak English, Portuguese, and a bit of Spanish, or Sportugal. It's a mix of Portuguese and Spanish. I understand French and Italian, but I can't speak them.

I grew up learning Russian and translating English songs when I became a teenager, we got to listen to West Germany radio stations, and learning lyrics with picture book. These are my first experiences with the English language.

Taking someone else's language and fitting it into your own speech - you learn a lot about other people's brains, doing that.

When I came here I moved to London and I was meeting so many new people and had to speak only in English, which is not my native language.

The public library is where I studied. It's where my grandfather taught himself English.