Spoken Language Quotes

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.

Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

Spoken language clearly differentiates Homo sapiens from all other creatures. None but humankind produces a complex spoken language, a medium for communication and a medium for introspective reflection.

Everyone is used to speaking a slightly different "language" with their parents than with their peers, because spoken language changes every generation - like they say, the past is a foreign country - but I think this is intensified for children whose parents also grew up in a geographically foreign country.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

In conducting interviews, my fascination is not only with the content of the conversation, but also the overall delivery of spoken language - so much of one's personality and story is embedded within their speech, their rhythms, the structure of their thoughts, their use of particular diction or dialect.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

The fact that slang is apt and forceful makes its use irresistibly tempting. Coarse or profane slang is beside the mark, but "flivver," "taxi," the "movies," "deadly" (meaning dull), "feeling fit," "feeling blue," "grafter," a "fake," "grouch," "hunch" and "right o!" are typical of words that it would make our spoken language stilted to exclude.

However much we admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.

The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

We are like dogs, cats, cows, rats ... What separates us from them and from the remaining matches against mammals is negligible. To have the same diseases. Rats spread plague like us, but we are just as contagious as them. And the dogs get diabetes, like we do, and get cancer, like us. And age, like us. And die, like us. Why then the biblical claim that man is the king of creation? Perhaps because only man has developed spoken language, the words, wherein lies its prodigious ability to lie.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher so skillful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one teaches them anything.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules.

When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages