Language Origins Quotes

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

Today, there are over 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world. They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but the latest studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

I enquire now as to the genesis of a philologist and assert the following: 1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are. 2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

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.

Nature impelled men to make sounds with their tongues And they found it useful to give names to things Much for the same reason that we see children now Have recourse to gestures because they cannot speak And point their fingers at things which appear before them.

Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

But all this language gotten, and augmented by Adam and his posterity, was again lost at the tower of Babel , when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an oblivion of his former language.

It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

(Actually now I’m remembering that the goodbye chow isn’t spelled that way. It’s ciao or something weird like that. It’s Italian, right? But I’m not an Italian gypsy, I’m a hungry gypsy. So spelling it chow makes total sense.)

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme.

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.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words.

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' - by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.

Drawing is the first language of the human being before writing. It's a transcription of how the human being sees reality, not reality itself.

It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do?

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.

I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion.

The alphabet was invented in Iraq, so it's a cool place.