language vitality Quotes

It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

Language is a living thing

One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.

Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust itsvitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile.

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

I play characters, and I try to play them in a manner that's appropriate to the script. Physical movement and vitality of language is part of character.

The way to recognize a dead word is that it exudes boredom.

It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.

Greek is the morning land of languages, and has the freshness of early dew in it which will never exhale.

Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.