Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning.
It was pretty awful for us children because we never really knew the local children. Mother was keen for us to learn languages, so our travels took us to France and Italy, as well as the West Country.
The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury.
All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.
I have learned to interface - what I think would be the contemporary term - with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I've learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
I'm always very careful to say I'm Irish-Ethiopian because I feel Ethiopian and I look Ethiopian and I am Ethiopian. But there are 81 languages in Ethiopia, and I don't know any of them.
I grew up in a community that was bilingual. I've done it for a while, singing in both languages.
Stay away from restaurants that have menus in five languages. That's always a tourist trap. You want to eat where the locals eat.
Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.
Our goal is to see Big History become a normal part of high school curricula. I'd love to see it being taught in lots of languages. A global course.
I feel French is very close to Urdu. Both languages are beautiful. Sadly, their beauty is lost in translation.
I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every documentary and tape of him that I could find - not just visual, but also audiocassettes, even in other languages when he was speaking in other dialects.
National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
I was very adept at acquiring languages.
Languages are true analytical methods.
I'm pretty good with languages.
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not.
The Bible was written in several languages, embraces many literary forms, and reflects cultures very different from our own. These are important considerations for properly understanding the Bible in its context.
Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
The Soviet Union had only one party. You couldn't express yourself freely; you couldn't admit belief in God. And yet this terrible regime understood that human beings have to express themselves, through music, even at a bad level. All kids studied music automatically, just as they did maths or languages or sport.
Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.
One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!
'I wish life was not so short,' he thought. 'Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.
The most horrifying thing I ever did was work as a steward on an airplane. I wanted to get hired by United. I thought, 'With my languages, this will be amazing; I will work in First Class.' But I could only get a job with an airline going from Newark, New Jersey to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.
My mum made a conscious decision not to teach me any Indian languages so I wouldn't talk with an accent.
And not only that but... when the station is completed, there will be an international crew made of astronauts coming from different cultural experiences, speaking different languages, but working together for a common goal.
We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.
In our generation, everybody told us that it's really important and it's nice to be able to speak a lot of languages. It's an art, too. It really impresses me, people who speak, like, seven languages. I admire them so much, so I began with English, and then Spanish and maybe Portuguese.
I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.
Not all my work features black actors. I mean, it's funny: someone was reading back to me all the languages that have appeared in my films, whether they were shorts or features. They span Arabic, French, Mandarin, Cantonese - all kinds of languages. I think it's really cool.
I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.