Quotes About Other Languages

#1. Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included.

Santino Hassell

#2. When my stories were translated into other languages and received good reviews in the international press and won prizes, some Arab festivals and newspapers began to take an interest in what I had produced. This sudden Arab interest is a form of hypocrisy and nonsense.

Hassan Blasim

#3. English loves to stay out all night dancing with other languages, all decked out in sparkling prepositions and irregular verbs. It is unruly and will not obey - just when you think you have it in hand, it lets down its hair along with a hundred nonsensical exceptions.

Catherynne M Valente

#4. A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.

David Crystal

#5. Travel the world, learn other languages, demand liberty, despise violence, read books, and keep a dictionary nearby.

Jeff B. Davis

#6. One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

Naguib Mahfouz

#7. The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

Victor Hugo

#8. English you're speaking," Matheus said. "The language that sidles up to other languages in dark alleys, mugs them, then rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary. It's the bitch-whore of languages and it owns the world. Suck on that, Rome boy.

Amy Fecteau

#9. I can speak English. I can speak Hindi. I can understand one or two other languages.

Azim Premji

#10. It's nice to represent to other people in the world that Americans actually do know what's happening in the world, can speak other languages and are conscientious. The perception quite often is that we don't know what's beyond our county line.

Cary Fukunaga

#11. It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case."

Sydney J. Harris

#12. I would love to learn other languages, maybe French? My uncle speaks German so maybe also German? Chinese seems to be too difficult.

Rafael Nadal

#13. If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.

Guido Van Rossum

#14. In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

William Golding

#15. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

James Nicoll

#16. I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

Peter Hoeg

#17. Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

Lev Grossman

#18. The main languages out of which web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source ... the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.

Mitch Kapor

#19. I start by using Chinese and many of the sounds of other languages are similar.

Andy Lau

#20. Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

Eric S. Raymond

#21. English doesn't borrow from other languages. english follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

James Nicoll

#22. The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.

Richard Stallman

#23. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. "Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist" [The Miracle of Language, page 54].

Bill Bryson

#24. The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.

Marshall McLuhan

#25. I've become obsessed with learning other languages in movies, because I was like, since I was like, but I learned how to box so why don't I just learn another language for a movie?

Jake Gyllenhaal

#26. It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, "depression" to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.

Andrew Solomon

#27. I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.

Eli Roth

#28. Eddie Izzard is doing his show in French ... Will he be able to fake ad-lib as well in other languages? He's been speaking French for a while now, but he's talking about doing his act in German. Haven't the German people suffered enough?

Andy Kindler

#29. When God created Man, he gave him Music as a language different from all other languages. And early man sang his glory in the wilderness; and drew the hearts of kings and moved them from their thrones.

Khalil Gibran

#30. He who knows other languages feels even closer to his own language.

Kato Lomb

#31. The Scots language is a mark of the distinctive identity of the Scottish people; and as such we should be concerned to preserve it, even if there were no other reason, because it is ours. This statement requires neither explanation nor apology.

J.Derrick McClure

#32. Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either.

Guido Van Rossum

#33. Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.

Jean De La Bruyere

#34. Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him.

Arthur Miller

#35. The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a

Lyndsay Faye

#36. If you know two languages, the level of your intelligence
is multiplied a hundredfold in other people's eyes.

Bill Cosby

#37. Bryson says that "we tend to regard other people's languages as we regard their cultures - with ill-hidden disdain." Too true. Unfortunately, Bryson proves himself right with a series of stories that should have set off his own too-bizarre-to-be-true detector.

Robert Lane Greene

#38. The precision provided (or enforced) by programming languages and their execution can identify lacunas, ambiguities, and other areas of potential confusion in conventional [mathematical] notation.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#39. The way people want to get respect for their culture and language, it is critical to reciprocate the same to other else you don't have any right to condemn others.

Pankaj Gupta

#40. The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.

Philip Pullman

#41. I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at eighty as I was at twenty; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.

Oliver Sacks

#42. Conversation can be as mutually incomprehensible as foreign languages. We need the different and complementary perspectives of the various yogas - and ideally of all religions - not only to reach God but to reach each other.

Huston Smith

#43. I like to read, especially nonfiction. I love learning, so I study languages, cook, learn basic HTML, and enjoy other activities that stimulate communication and the dark recesses of my musician's brain.

Joshua Roman

#44. In New Guinea, as in other hot spots of endangerment, indigenous languages are a user's guide to ecosystems that are increasingly fragile and - in the face of climate change - increasingly irreplaceable.

Anonymous

#45. Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The constructions and the different endings are not easy to master, especially if you are an English speaker.

John Mole

#46. Languages connect us and break down barriers when we unite to nurture the best in us and help each other succeed. Happy International Mother Language Day!

Widad Akreyi

#47. People think that other international languages are smarter and more business wise. But they have to understand that we have to preserve our culture.

Enock Maregesi

#48. A strong tie binds novelists to their mother tongue. Though novelists can and do write in languages other than their own, there is a common belief that a novel has a special, almost mystical affinity with the novelist's mother tongue.

Minae Mizumura

#49. Every human being should know two languages: the language of society and the language of signs. One serves to communicate with other people, the other serves to understand God's messages.

Paulo Coelho

#50. But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl .

Larry Wall

#51. English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.

Rabih Alameddine

#52. Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.

Christopher Barzak

#53. I'm certainly curious about people. As a kid, I moved around a lot. I was raised in a lot of different places, and thanks to working in the movies, I've gotten to keep traveling. I've always been interested in other cultures and languages.

Viggo Mortensen

#54. The Language of the Dream/Night is contrary to that of Waking/Day. It is a language of Images and Sensations, the various dialects of which are far less different from each other, than the various Day-Languages of Nations.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#55. They were always like two people talking to each other in different languages. But she loved him so much, when he withdrew as he had now done, it was like the warm sun going down and leaving her in chilly twilight dews.

Margaret Mitchell

#56. While Jesus is saving, I'm spending all my daysin backgrounds and landscapes with the languages of saints.While people are spinning like toys on Christmas day,I'm inside a still life with the other absentee.

St. Vincent

#57. To use two languages familiarly and without contaminating one by the other, is very difficult; and to use more than two is hardly to be hoped. The prizes which some have received for their multiplicity of languages may be sufficient to excite industry, but can hardly generate confidence.

Samuel Johnson

#58. There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.

Yehuda Amichai

#59. Film is one if three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.

Frank Capra

#60. Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

George Santayana

#61. When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end.

Orhan Pamuk

#62. In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are being taught a variety of other gestural languages. And it is just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans to regain the ability-lost, according to Josephus, since Eden-to communicate with the animals.

Carl Sagan

#63. People come from around the world and can understand each other without even speaking the same languages!

Sergei Bubka

#64. INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.

Ambrose Bierce

#65. The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject.

Noam Chomsky

#66. Even in India the Hindi film industry might be the best known but there are movies made in other regional languages in India, be it Tamil or Bengali. Those experiences too are different from the ones in Bombay.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

#67. The world's five thousand extant languages are products of our shared ability, but the five thousand cultures they create are separate from each other.

Richard Leakey

#68. Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that - if Herodotus can be believed - was unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.

Stacy Schiff

#69. Well of course man. We Indians have lost everything. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.

Sherman Alexie

#70. To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

Delmore Schwartz

#71. England is very interested as well, and other countries if I could speak the languages!

Miranda Otto

#72. she likes the sound of languages other than English.

Ken Liu

#73. I spent a lot of time star-gazing, writing, and learning languages when the other kids were doing cooler things in Detroit.

Lizzo

#74. People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.

Siri Hustvedt

#75. Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Louise Erdrich

#76. The only way to learn a language properly, in fact, is to marry a man of that nationality. You get what they call in Europe a 'sleeping dictionary.' Of course, I have only been married five times, and I speak seven languages. I'm still trying to remember where I picked up the other two.

Zsa Zsa Gabor

#77. I'm a passionate Welshman. I have a culinary relationship with language: I taste what I say because I have two languages, and each informs the other.

Rhys Ifans

#78. They had been mistaken, it seemed, in seeking other tongues. Languages were not a special capacity, as she had once imagined, but incautious assent to the wrong kinds of meanings. A

Gail Jones

#79. Human pride and egoism always create divisions, build walls of indifference, hate and violence. The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, makes hearts capable of understanding the languages of all, as he re-establishes the bridge of authentic communication between earth and Heaven.

Pope Benedict XVI

#80. Maybe I not need feeling lonely, because I can talk to other "me." Is like seeing my two pieces of lips speaking in two languages at same time. Yes, I not lonely, because I with another me. Like Austin Powers with his Mini Me

Xiaolu Guo