A Quote by Edmund de Waal

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.

Edmund de Waal

Quote Topics

Another Anywhere Home Languages Move Situation Social

Quote Author

Edmund de Waal
English - Artist
Born: 1964

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

Amos Oz

Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.

Hannah Arendt

With languages, you are at home anywhere

Edmund de Waal

I work in Hebrew. Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages. Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English. The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages. Every language has influences and is an influence.

Amos Oz

English is big business and languages are dying as never before. Is there a connection? Is this another manifestation of McDonaldisation – the undesirable face of globalization? Do we want to lose the variety of languages and all the rich culture that comes with them?

Patricia Ryan

Writing in African languages became a topic of discussion in conferences, in schools, in classrooms; the issue is always being raised - so it's no longer "in the closet," as it were. It's part of the discussion going on about the future of African literature. The same questions are there in Native American languages, they're there in native Canadian languages, they're there is some marginalized European languages, like say, Irish. So what I thought was just an African problem or issue is actually a global phenomenon about relationships of power between languages and cultures.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.

Judith Lynne Hanna

The great shift... is the movement away from the value-laden languages of... the "humanities," and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the "sciences." This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is... especially important in psychology... and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen.

Thomas Szasz

Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state.

David Crystal

My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation.

Carol Gilligan

I have become interested in languages which I cannot make up, which I cannot create or even create in: I have become interested in languages which I can only come up upon (as I disappear), a pirate upon buried treasure. The dreamer, the dreaming, the dream. I call these languages, languages of the body.

Kathy Acker

My impression was and is that many programming languages and tools represent solutions looking for problems, and I was determined that my work should not fall into that category. Thus, I follow the literature on programming languages and the debates about programming languages primarily looking for ideas for solutions to problems my colleagues and I have encountered in real applications. Other programming languages constitute a mountain of ideas and inspiration-but it has to be mined carefully to avoid featurism and inconsistencies.

Bjarne Stroustrup

The home ministry's role should be focused. There are so many items under it today; it has to look after even official languages. There should be a minister looking after internal security, and the remaining things should go under another ministry. Things like official languages can be looked after by the human resources development ministry.