Primitive Language Quotes

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to a long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line--even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

[Rock 'n' roll] music started out with some cat banging a log with a couple of pieces of stick. He sent a message across a river and although the cat on the other side receiving the message didn't know the exact words, he did understand basically something about what was being communicated.

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.

We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word. From India, out of the Vedas, we still hear: On the spoken word, all the gods depend, all beasts and men; in the world live all creatures...The word is the name of the divine world.

The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.

There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

MONOSYLLABIC, adj. Composed of words of one syllable . . . Commonly Saxon - that is to say, words of a barbarous people destitute of ideas and incapable of any but the most elementary sentiments and emotions.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.

Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

In very ancient times of human evolution upon earth, humanity's revelation in word and sound was not differentiated in song and speech, but they were one.

He doesn't write like a Neanderthal. He may be a Cro-Magnon.