English language

"Johannes Diderik van der Waals (1837–1923) graduated in 1873 in Leyden with a thesis that would make him famous. It was in Dutch ... The famous ... physicist James Clerk Maxwell, much impressed with this piece of work, remarked that it had prompted quite a few researchers to take up the study of the Low Dutch Language. ... In 1910, Van der Waals received the Nobel Prize, but the Low Dutch Language never made it as an internationally accepted language of science, which in previous centuries had been Latin and Greek, later German, French and English. Today, to the regret of some, all science happens in English."

"The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language."

"The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship."

"Luther is often praised for having given, in the September Bible, a language to the emerging German nation. In his Bible translation, Tyndales conscious use of everyday words, without inversions, in a neutral word-order, and his wonderful ear for rhythmic patterns, gave to English not only a Bible language, but a new prose. England was blessed as a nation in that the language of its principal book, as the Bible in English rapidly became, was the fountain from which flowed the lucidity, suppleness and expressive range of the greatest prose thereafter."

"[...] you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids [...], and no more legitimate than any of the other results."

"It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language. A Frenchman in America is not expected to talk like an American, but an Englishman speaking his mother tongue is thought to be affected and giving himself airs. Or else he is taken for a German or a Dutchman, and is complimented on his grammatical mastery of the language of another nation."