#lang

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#music

There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression... We have yet to become fluent in the language -and music- of the wild. ↗

— Boyd Norton

#animals #language #wilderness #music

Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it. ↗

— John H. McWhorter

#music

There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into dipthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught in surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay. ↗

— Tony Burgess

#zombies #change

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#harmony #language #listening #nature #waves

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#language #tongue #nature

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#nature #reality #nature

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing, but a compromise- that which is common to you, me, and everybody. ↗

— Thomas Hulme

#nature

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have. ↗

— Frances Mayes

#poetry #nature

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language. ↗

— Chuck Palanhiuk

#language #words #nature