“There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.”
John Millington Synge (1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore
The Aran Islands (1907)
The Irish News (November 3, 1987)
“There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.”
John Millington Synge (1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore
The Aran Islands (1907)
Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917–2008) Irish politician
"Irishness", in New Statesman, January 17, 1959
Written under the pseudonym Donat O'Donnell.
Thomas Cahill book How the Irish Saved Civilization
Source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), Ch. VI What Was Found
“A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.”
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher
A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
Umberto Eco book Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
[O] : Introduction, 0.8
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: A general semiotics studies the whole of the human signifying activity — languages — and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals. It studies and describes languages through languages. By studying the human signifying activity it influences its course. A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object.
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet
From A Note on Poetry (circa 1936) quoted in Modern American Poetry (1950) by Louis Untermeyer
General sources
“Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry.”
1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), The Poet