Deutscher Quotes

#1. According to some researchers, hominids prior to Homo sapiens could not, for instance, produce the vowel i {ee}. But ultimately, this does not say very much, since by all accounts, et es perfectle pesseble to have a thoroughle respectable language wethout the vowel i.

Guy Deutscher

#2. abstract' comes from a Latin verb which simply meant 'draw away' (abstrahere).

Guy Deutscher

#3. The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel.

Isaac Deutscher

#4. The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.

Guy Deutscher

#5. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

Guy Deutscher

#6. I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.

Isaac Deutscher

#7. The parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages.

Guy Deutscher

#8. It is necessary to distinguish the nationalism of the oppressing nations from the nationalism of the oppressed

Isaac Deutscher

#9. Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue.

Guy Deutscher

#10. But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.

Guy Deutscher

#11. the brain of a child learning a language can cope with a mind-boggling amount of linguistic complexity.

Guy Deutscher

#12. Needless to say, genders cheer up the everyday life of ordinary mortals too.

Guy Deutscher

#13. The works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx had been forbidden. Students' libraries and clubs had been closed; and informers had been planted in the lecture halls. Entry fees had been raised fivefold to bar academic education to children of poor parents.

Isaac Deutscher

#14. The names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.

Guy Deutscher

#15. There are many languages that don't make a distinction between green and blue and treat these as shades of one color.

Guy Deutscher

#16. Word that is not actively used by one generation will not be heard by the next generation and will then be lost forever.

Guy Deutscher

#17. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.

Guy Deutscher

#18. There is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure!

Guy Deutscher

#19. Some languages, for example, have a gender distinction that is based only on "animacy," the distinction between animate beings (people and animals of both sexes) and inanimate things.

Guy Deutscher

#20. Since red is a signal for many vital things, most importantly danger (blood) and sex

Guy Deutscher

#21. But on 1 March 1881 the conspirators succeeded in assassinating the Tsar. To

Isaac Deutscher

#22. change is not the exception but the rule.

Guy Deutscher

#23. The hunger for land: that great hunger which for more than half a century was to shake Russia and to throw her into a fever, body and mind.

Isaac Deutscher

#24. people find names for things they feel the need to talk about.

Guy Deutscher

#25. The gentry's jurisdiction over the peasantry was restored. The universities were closed to the children of the lower classes; the radical literary periodicals were banned; the nation, including the intelligentsia, was to be forced back into mute submission. Revolutionary

Isaac Deutscher

#26. envisaged Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday as men but Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday as women. Why should this be so?

Guy Deutscher

#27. Keeping order is a crutch for those who are too lazy to search for things ... )

Guy Deutscher

#28. Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.

Isaac Deutscher

#29. Fluent speech, there are no real spaces between words, so when two words frequently appear together they can easily fuse into one.

Guy Deutscher

#30. And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity

Guy Deutscher

#31. Trees have roots, Jews have legs.

Isaac Deutscher

#32. The normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is nothing can well be more useless. Edward Sapir - 1924

Guy Deutscher

#33. The idea of a revolution through the people was gradually replaced by that of a conspiracy to be planned and carried out by a small and determined minority from the intelligentsia.

Isaac Deutscher

#34. We see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.

Guy Deutscher

#35. There is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages.

Guy Deutscher

#36. Without these much maligned forces of destruction, language would never have developed in the first place.

Guy Deutscher