#language

They cannot make it say what they want it to say. And this is the beginning and the end of the case for retaining the old language: If the churches give it up, who will remember how to say what is said? ↗

— Clifford Longley

#cannot #case #churches #end #give

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations. ↗

— Thomas Lynch

#essentially #i #language #make #me

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done. ↗

— Thomas Lynch

#done #entirely #gets #i #ignored

We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#come #deeper #distance #even #exhilaration

The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs. ↗

— Arthur E. Waite

#offers #other #signs #speaks #symbolism

It was pretty awful for us children because we never really knew the local children. Mother was keen for us to learn languages, so our travels took us to France and Italy, as well as the West Country. ↗

— Mary Wesley

#because #children #country #france #italy

Language is wine upon the lips. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#lips #upon #wine

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself. ↗

— Steve Wozniak

#actually #build #computer #could #did

These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech. Other mammals have no contact between their air passages and oesophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months - curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#bill-bryson #cro-magnon #language #mammals #mother-tongue

I have never designed a language for its own sake. ↗

— Niklaus Wirth

#i #language #never #own #sake