Language is always a placeholder for a culture’s evolving understanding of itself, the space in which we work out our concepts as we learn how to think about them in learning how to speak of them.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Language, Life & Society
When you’re a latecomer to a language, what happens is you live there with a continuous and perpetual frustration. As latecomers, we always want to say more, you know, crack better jokes, say better things, but we end up saying less because there’s a gap between the mind and the tongue. And that gap is very intimidating. But if we manage not to be frightened … [ Read more ]
Author: Elif Shafak | Source: TED | Subject: Language
It’s worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. On the other … [ Read more ]
Author: David Graeber | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Language
It is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience.
Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Language, Life & Society
A metaphor brings two separate domains into cognitive and emotional relation by using the language appropriate to one as a lens for seeing the other.
Author: Max Black | Subject: Language
To have a second language is to possess a second soul.
Author: Charlemagne | Subject: Language