Language Constraints Quotes

It's very difficult to find even one or two criteria that you will find in every Internet situation, and the reason is that the technology constrains language in individual ways.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

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

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

Words are an imperfect medium for explaining.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.

Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.

Language cannot say everything, fortunately.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.

It's botherin' me, man. You know, you can't say this, you can't say that, I'm like, well, how am I gonna talk about the world? You know? I mean I need to talk about something to you all, can I - can I do it? Can I talk to y'all? I mean, I hope the kids are in bed, you know, because I got to talk, y'all.

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

The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.

To the extent that language forces experiences into categories it is a screen between reality and the human being. In a word, we pay for its benefits... Therefore, while using language, as we must of necessity, we should be aware of its shortcomings.

The precise correlation between the information you communicated, and the facts insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated is such as to cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear.

Grammar is the grave of letters.