When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is th — Language

"Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”"

"Okay, boys. Tonights homework. Algebra: x to the nth + y to the nth = z to the nth. Well, youre never gonna use that, are you? Imperialism and the First World War. What was done is done. No point thinking about it now. German, French, Spanish. Ja, ja, oui, oui, si, si. Its nonsense. Everyone speaks English anyway. And if they dont, they ought to."

"We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s[emantic] r[eactions] and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us."

"How else can I say it? I dont speak no other languages."

"Uniformism had created the demand that all people with an identical or similar literary language should draw together in common political units. Yet literary languages are usually artificial creations, coined by certain masters at a given moment in history and accepted by the upper classes. The English-speaking reader should bear in mind that the literary languages of the European continent are not of aristocratic or royal mark. "The Kings English" has no equivalent either in the Germanic countries nor in the Mediterranean area. It usually is the upper bourgeoisie who speaks the literary, i.e., the artificially standardized language, with the greatest perfection, while there is often a "low-class" dialectical strain in the idiom of the nobility and even royalty. The Empress Maria Theresa spoke broadest Viennese, and this local dialect continued to be used by the Emperors of Austria until 1848. The late King of Saxony repeatedly used the Saxonian dialect, and argot expressions are far more widespread in aristocratic circles around Paris and Budapest than in the haute bourgeoisie, which always prided itself on a strongly standardized language, which is nothing else but an intranational Esperanto (understood and spoken everywhere inside the nation)."

"Une louange en grec est dune merveilleuse efficace à la tête dun livre."