A Quote by Wade Davis
A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. ... Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.
Related Quotes
The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.
Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.
It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.
Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.
The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.
There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.
Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.
Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.
Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.
I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.
English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar. It's the most punderful language because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass that makes a lingo good for punning.
English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar. Its the most punderful language because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass that makes a lingo good for punning.
The body is a very low level machine language. The language of the soul, of the mind, is much more evolved.
Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way.
The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.
For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.
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