A Quote by Jacques Barzun

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

Jacques Barzun

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English Mother Mother Tongue Simple Tongue Worked

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Jacques Barzun
American - Educator
November 30, 1907 - October 25, 2012

I think it's really hard for me... to sing in English, because it's not my mother tongue.

Bill Kaulitz

My mother - both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother's an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each.

David Plotz

[My mother tongue is] Albanian. But, I am equally fluent in Bengali (language of Calcutta) and English.

Mother Teresa

I've mostly worked in Hindi and occasionally Gujarati, which is my mother tongue.

Supriya Pathak

For us Indians, I don't think English can ever exude that magic of emotions which our mother tongue can.

Kailash Kher

Apart from English, I speak my mother tongue Malayalam, as well as Tamil, Telugu, and a bit of Kannada and French.

Asin

I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor.

Max von Sydow

I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor

Max von Sydow

If the English educated neglect, as they have done and even now continue, as some do, to be ignorant of their mother tongue, linguistic starvation will abide.

Mahatma Gandhi

Having portrayed English-speaking Indian characters in British and American projects, I have always wanted to use my mother tongue in an Indian film.

Art Malik

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.

Louis D. Brandeis

My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.

Chris Abani

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

Peter Farb

Unlike our neighbours on the mainland of Europe, we have resisted creating an academy to legislate over proper English. We each have our linguistic bugbear, but few of us would want to freeze our mother tongue.

Susie Dent

Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world

Amy Tan

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

A Quote by Jacques Barzun

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