A Quote by Patricia Ryan
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?
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The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.
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.
The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.
english doesn't borrow from other languages. english follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
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.
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.
Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.
It's like there are all these languages available, especially in terms of image. Why confine yourself to only English? There's all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak or communicate with.
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.
With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.
Each year, in this world, several languages do die out. There are certain languages that have their survival assured for many years, such as English, but there are other languages whose survival is not so sure, such as Catalan, especially if they don't have a state that protects them. Catalan is spoken in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and Andorra. There are about ten million people who understand it and eight and a half who can speak it. But its future is much less certain than, for example, Danish or Slovenian or Latvian, because they have a state.
I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
I think the thing that allows me to go into so many markets is that I can speak all the languages. Korean, Chinese, English, whatever. Thank you, my parents, for teaching me all the languages.
English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.
Lexical variety, eccentric constructions and punctuation, variant spellings, archaisms, the ability to pile clause on clause, the effortless incorporation of words from other languages: flexibility, and inclusiveness, is what makes English great; and diversity is what keeps it healthy and growing, exuberantly regenerating itself with rich new forms and usages.
In our generation, everybody told us that it's really important and it's nice to be able to speak a lot of languages. It's an art, too. It really impresses me, people who speak, like, seven languages. I admire them so much, so I began with English, and then Spanish and maybe Portuguese.
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