Language Relativity Quotes

If you don't know foreign languages, you don't know anything about your own.

There is nothing outside the text

We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

When you work in a different language you are not so attached to the words.

'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.

An object is not so attached to its name that we cannot find another one that would suit it better.

Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's. The meaning of 'God' may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world.

Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right.

There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.