Language Perception Quotes

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear.... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak.

Language and accents govern so much of how people think about other people.

We're very aggressive speakers. I remember when I was with one of my roommates in New York - and she's Portuguese, too - and we were in an Apple store talking about a computer in Portuguese. Some guy comes up to us and goes, "Hey, hey! Peace, peace! Stop arguing." It's not arguing. This is really just how we talk.

When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it.

People never think about words, they only feel them.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one.

When I heard Puerto Ricans in New York City, it sounded very strange. And the first time I heard someone from Spain, I thought they had a speech impediment!

Maybe my job on this planet is to make the Asian accent sexy.

In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here.

Also, I think having a musicality about me that helps in identifying different things in languages and getting them right.

I had no idea what they were saying in Italian as a child, they spoke too quickly on the radio. But I realized that language was very funny.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks he can talk about language.

A gloss is a total system of perception and language.

Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.

I'm good with accents and stuff; it's mostly that I have a really good Spanish accent, so it sounds like I speak a lot better than I do.

It makes sense to me that the polyglot wouldn't know what language he dreamed in.