A Quote by Elliott Colla

In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.

Elliott Colla

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Beautiful Being Breaking Breaking Rules Broken Certain Couple Efficient Eloquent English Even Expressive Gets Happens Kind Novels Perfectly Rules She Spoken Standard Well

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Elliott Colla

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

William Labov

Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.

John McWhorter

That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable . . . but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.

John R. Rickford

My father was English. He date-raped my mother so she's hated English men ever since. You know my boyfriend's English, and I'm, uh, I'm half-English, which she's never been real happy about. If she finds out I'm dating someone English, she'll ah, think I' turning my back on her and becoming a foreigner.' Cathy, that's the stupidest reason I've ever heard.

Jeaniene Frost

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

Lafcadio Hearn

English is a forgiving language. It's not like Classical Arabic and it's not like French. You can speak broken English and be expressive and no one will hold it against you.

Elliott Colla

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

William Golding

Good English, well spoken and well written will open more doors than a college degree... Bad English will slam doors you don't even know exist.

William Raspberry

The revival of Hebrew, as a spoken language, is a fascinating story, which I'm afraid I cannot squeeze into a few sentences. But, let me give you a clue. Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.

Amos Oz

A lot of the demos I write are all in English, so releasing music in English isn't translating to English, it's just keeping them in English.

Henry Lau

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.

Olga Tokarczuk

My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or with, you know, with small talk in English.

J. M. G. Le Clezio

English is no problem for me because I am actually English. My whole family are English; I was brought up listening to various forms of the English accent.

Guy Pearce

My fitness trainer's English, my physio's English, some of my friends are English. I don't have a problem with English people at all.

Andy Murray

I saw Chekhov a number of times in English, and I thought that it translates very well in English, for some reason, from the Russian to the English.

Isabelle Huppert

I can hardly believe that I even know this, but I am aware that Noah Webster's original dictionary, apart from being the first truly American lexicography, was a kind of line in the sand. It claimed a very discrete, American form of the English language, explicitly to compare it to the English of our erstwhile colonial masters who had been operating under Dr. Johnson's dictionary rules for well over a century.

Bob Garfield

A Quote by Elliott Colla

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