Linguistic Preservation Quotes

The written word endures, the spoken word disappears

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.

Nothing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muse can be changed from its own to another language without destroying its sweetness

You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.

To what better purpose can a man's energy be devoted, and his talents, than the resuscitation of his country's language?

Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations.

Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.

I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.

Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as its language.

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

Language, after all, is organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.

All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

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.

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not.

Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of "The Lord of the Rings". You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

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.

As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature.

Language is fossil Poetry.

We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.

There's a fashion abroad generally to speak the language as badly as possible. I'm of a mind to start a society for the reinstatement of the letter 't' and the banishment of the glottal stop.