#language

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down. ↗

— John Edgar Wideman

#children #language #words #music

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

We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life. ↗

— David Amram

#both #common #common interests #country #dreams

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it. ↗

— Theodor Adorno

#history #language #merely #place #takes

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. ↗

— James A. Baldwin

#control #describing #every #function #language

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath. ↗

— Lynn Abbey

#bullets #by the time #dodging #end #english

Everybody needs to understand that I learned Arabic from the United States Army as a second language. I never spoke it at home. ↗

— John Abizaid

#army #body needs #everybody #home #i

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention. ↗

— Drew Barrymore

#convey #dictionaries #dictionary #english #english language

She walks to a table She walk to table She is walking to a table She walk to table now What difference does it make What difference it make In Nature, no completeness No sentence really complete thought Language, like woman, Look best when free, undressed. ↗

— Wang Ping

#syntax #woman #nature

In classes, the more lively and uninhibited ones will “suck away the air” from those with a more passive nature, despite all the efforts of the teacher. It is also a special danger in large groups that you will hear your fellow students’ bad pronunciation more than the teacher’s perfected speech. ↗

— Kató Lomb

#nature