“Wilhelm von Humboldt… stated that the structure of language expresses the inner life of its speakers: "Man lives with the world about him, principally, indeed exclusively, as language presents it."”

— Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)

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Peter Farb 92

American academic and writer 1929–1980

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“Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."”

John Backus (1924–2007) American computer scientist

"Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?" http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1283933&type=pdf, 1977 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 21 (8), (August 1978): pp. 639-640

“A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

“The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns.

“Mathematics, too, is a language, and as concerns its structure and content it is the most perfect language which exists, superior to any vernacular; indeed, since it is understood by every people, mathematics may be called the language of languages. Through it, as it were, nature herself speaks; through it the Creator of the world has spoken, and through it the Preserver of the world continues to speak.”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 5.

“Language in its original imaginative form maybe said to have expressiveness, but no meaning. About such language we cannot distinguish between what the speaker says and what he means… Language in its intellectualized form has both expressiveness and meaning. As language, it expressed a certain emotion. As symbolism, it refers beyond that emotion to the thought whose emotional charge it is… The progressive intellectualization of language, its progressive conversion by the work of grammar and logic into a scientific symbolism, thus represents not a progressive drying-up of emotion, but its progressive articulation and specialization. We are not getting away from an emotional atmosphere into a dry, rational atmosphere; we are acquiring new emotions and new means of expressing them.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Principles of Art (1938), p. 269

“A language is said to be dead when no one speaks it any more. It may continue to have existence in a recorded form, of course-traditionally in writing, more recently as part of a sound or video archive (and it does in a sense `live on’ in this way) – but unless it has fluent speakers one would not talk of it as a `living language’. And as speakers cannot demonstrate their fluency if they have no one to talk to, a language is effectively dead when there is only one speaker left, with no member of the younger generation interested in learning it. But what do we say if there are two speakers left, or 20, or 200? How many speakers guarantee life for a language?”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 11

“Ebbinghaus: Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time.
Croce: Language is articulated, limited sound organized for the purpose of expression.
Dittrich: Language is the totality of expressive abilities of individual human beings and animals capable of being understood by at least one other individual.
Eisler: Language is any expression of experiences by a creature with a soul.
B. Erdmann: Language is not a kind of communication of ideas but a kind of thinking: stated or formulated thinking. Language is a tool, and in fact a tool or organ of thinking that is unique to us as human beings.
Forbes: Language is an ordered sequence of words by which a speaker expresses his thoughts with the intention of making them known to a hearer.
J. Harris : Words are the symbols of ideas both general and particular: of the general, primarily, essentially and immediately; of the particular, only secondarily, accidentally and mediately.
Hegel: Language is the act of theoretical intelligence in its true sense, for it is its outward expression.
Jespersen: Language is human activity which has the aim of communicating ideas and emotions.
Jodl: Verbal language is the ability of man to fashion, by means of combined tones and sounds based on a limited numbers of elements, the total stock of his perceptions and conceptions in this natural tone material in such a way that this psychological process is clear and comprehensible to others to its least detail.
Kainz : Language is a structure of signs, with the help of which the representation of ideas and facts may be effected, so that things that are not present, even things that are completely imperceptible to the senses, may be represented.
De Laguna: Speech is the great medium through which human co-operation is brought about.
Marty: Language is any intentional utterance of sounds as a sign of a psychic state.
Pillsbury-Meader: Language is a means or instrument for the communication of thought, including ideas and emotions.
De Saussure: Language is a system of signs expressive of ideas.
Schuchardt. The essence of language lies in communication.
Sapir: Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.”

Géza Révész (1878–1955) Hungarian psychologist and musicologist

Footnote at pp. 126-127; As cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 313-314
The Origins and Prehistory of Language, 1956

“Gaelic is not a regional language - it is a truly nationwide language. And the future success of Gaelic depends on attracting new speakers to the language here as much as its does on fostering Gaelic in its traditional heartland.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Lecture (December 19, 2007)

“I am told that I adopt new and unusual language, not reconcilable with the true principals of the science. To me it appears that the unusual and, indeed, inconsistent language is that used by my opponents.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter I, Section I, On Value, p. 11
Context: If I have to hire a labourer for a week, and instead of ten shillings I pay him eight, no variation having taken place in the value of money, the labourer can probably obtain more food and necessaries with his eight shillings than he before obtained for ten: but this is owing, not to a rise in the real value of his wages, as stated by Adam Smith, and more recently by Mr. Malthus, but to a fall in the value of the things on which his wages are expended, things perfectly distinct; and yet for calling this a fall in the real value of wages, I am told that I adopt new and unusual language, not reconcilable with the true principals of the science. To me it appears that the unusual and, indeed, inconsistent language is that used by my opponents.

“Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Word Play (1974)

“Wilhelm von Humboldt… stated that the structure of language expresses the inner life of its speakers: "Man lives with the world about him, principally, indeed exclusively, as language presents it."”

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Peter Farb 92

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