A Quote by Susie Dent

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

Susie Dent

Quote Topics

Always Been Continent Encountered English Every Mongrel Snapping Speakers Tongue Up Words

Quote Author

Susie Dent
English - Scientist

From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.

Susie Dent

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

All the English speakers, or almost all, have difficulties with the gender of words.

Bernard Pivot

James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world.

Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh

Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.

Russell Baker

The biggest issue for me has been the language because I speak so much German now. I've had to focus on my English and find more words to describe what I want to say and also soften my tone. It was quite stiff from 20 years of speaking German, so when I started speaking more English, oh my god, my tongue was like: 'Argh'!

Motsi Mabuse

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.

Rabih Alameddine

If you think of every single continent there is, on every continent, there is something, a natural resource that every continent has, or sources, that they can really survive with that, or they can trade with that. But a lot of the developed nations have taken those things from those places and have claimed it and, therefore, they're dependent on those other nations.

Stevie Wonder

My songs are always on the tip of my tongue. It's always bubbling and brewing and about to come out. I can't really put it into words, but the best way to explain it is feeling like you constantly have some things on the tip of your tongue.

Bibi Bourelly

I make up many words but we can go on for forever about slang words that E-40 created. That has always been one of my things since was youngster. I have always being creative with my words.

E-40

It's no longer possible to simply build English country houses out of words, because they've already been so thoroughly described that all the applicable words have been used up, and one is forced to build them instead out of words recycled and scavenged from other descriptions of other country houses.

Lev Grossman

On the one hand, there is no question that English - frequently bad English - has become the universal language of scholarship. It is clearly a tremendous handicap for people outside of the United States, Britain, and Australia and a few other countries because few of them are native speakers, but we demand that they present and publish in English.

Henry Rosovsky

The choosing among words is made by every user of the language, and not exclusively by professional speakers and writers.

Wilson Follett

I just write like a grown man, because that's what I listen to. I'm not even speaking complicated English... I don't do five-syllable words, I don't do four-syllable words. This is English. Rudimentary English.

Earl Sweatshirt

I'm a mongrel in the sense that I'm Spanish, English, Latino, Jewish, north, south - all these things are mixed in me.

Ariel Dorfman

Words are powerful. The tongue is powerful. And when you write it down, and record it, and press it up, it's 100 million times more powerful. It's important to utilize our tongue to help people.

Cordae

A Quote by Susie Dent

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors