Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication. The scientific study of language in any of its senses is called linguistics.
The approximately 3000–6000 languages that are spoken by humans today are the most salient examples, but natural languages can also be based on visual rather than auditory stimuli, for ...
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Quotations About This Subject:
- The word of man is the most durable of all material. ,
- Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation. ,
- I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. ,
- We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative. ,
- Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing. ,
- The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay ,
- As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise. ,
- No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead. ,
- Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas. ,
- Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.
