
“Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?”
Source: Handle with Care
Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Twelve (p. 394).
“Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?”
Source: Handle with Care
“A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.”
“We shared a common tongue, but my language was a different language from theirs.”
Black Boy (1945)
Context: All my life I have done nothing but feel and cultivate my feelings; all their lives they had done nothing but strive for petty goals, the trivial material prizes of American life. We shared a common tongue, but my language was a different language from theirs.
“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.”
This actually first appears in Recent Experiments in Psychology (1950) by Leland Whitney Crafts, Théodore Christian Schneirla, and Elsa Elizabeth Robinson, where it is expressed:
: If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
Randy Allen Harris, in Rhetoric and Incommensurability (2005), p. 35, and an endnote on p. 138 indicates the misattribution seems to have originated in a misreading of quotes in Patterns Of Discovery: An Inquiry Into The Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958) by Norwood Russell Hanson, where an actual quotation of WIttgenstein on p. 184 is followed by one from the book on psychology.
Misattributed
Interview with Robin Denselow (May 2008)
Source: Denselow, Robin, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2280144,00.html, Robin Denselow talks to African superstar and activist Miriam Makeba, The Guardian, 15, London, 16 May 2008, 18 November 201
“They gave us the language but it is only we who know how to use it”
The Black Album, Uncle Asif, Chapter One, (1995).
“Languages are not owned
by nations but by the people who use them
and make them live.”
A contribution for the WikiAfrica Literature Project