Language Quotes

“Philosophers wonder whether the things we categorize are there because we have words for them or because there really is an underlying distinction or perhaps they are just imagined. That is, do languages agree about what the world consists of because the world consists of those things or because humans share limitations that lead them to perceive the world in similar ways?”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“In spite of such obvious difficulties in convincing others about things cultures do not have, it is possible to find evidence of absence rather than merely absence of evidence. And sometimes the absence of something teaches us more about the world than its presence. Sometimes it is the conjunction of the things we can talk about and the things we cannot talk about that reveals more about us then either of these alone. And the things we talk about and don’t talk about can affect the way we think. Different languages and different cultures can, therefore, produce different thoughts.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“In other words, in response to the question, ‘Can anything at all be translated from any language to any other language,’ the answer seems to be, ‘No. Different languages might have different expressive powers for different kinds of information.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“reflected in their language – then it must be concluded that thought is independent of language in important ways.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Yet homogenization is so tempting. Generalizations and theoretical simplifications are fundamental to our ability to survive in and understand the world. Never doubt their usefulness. But they are neither more important nor logically prior to the basic work of carefully describing the uniqueness of each language, what holds it together in Sapir’s sense. And what holds all languages together is the connection between each language’s grammar and its culture.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“But will it really matter in a hundred years that such-and-such a language has died? Yes, as a matter of fact it will. It is a matter of the gravest concern. There are many reasons to be alarmed at language loss. The main reason is that all languages are tools not merely for their community of speakers but for the entire human race. There are about 6,800 mutually unintelligible languages spoken in the world today. Many languages spoken in the past have ceased to exist and many more languages will come into being in the future. Since the arrival of Homo sapiens, new languages have been constantly emerging as others have vanished. This is why many linguists say that the total number of actual languages spoken in the world at a given moment of human history is but a small fragment of the much larger number of possible human languages.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Collectively, therefore, languages express the collective wisdom of our species in ways that are never fully translatable in their entirety from one language to another. In the course of human history, however, many peoples have changed tools, that is, they have switched languages. When all the speakers of a language switch to another language, then the former language has died. This is how linguists describe a language that is no longer spoken, whether or not it is written – it is a dead language.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Whatever other theoretical conclusions might follow from the Pirahã number and color facts, we have learned from this community that there are languages without math and without color words. And this, incidentally, weakens the nativist claim that numbers arise ontogenetically (in each individually developing human) from the human genome.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“therefore, produce different thoughts.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Tolstoy made this very point brilliantly at the end of War and Peace: ‘In historical events great men – so-called – are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“For the sake of discussion, Mozart may have been the smartest human to have ever walked upon our planet. But this no more makes Austrian culture the highest on any cultural evolutionary scale than Hitler’s birth in Austria makes Austrian culture the worst.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“The basic idea was that societies advance in stages from primitiveness to civilization. Europeans have reached the highest stage of development in this view (what a coincidence that the propounders of this view saw themselves at the apex of cultural evolution).”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Linguistic anthropologists are often concerned with how power and language interact in specific cultures. So they ask questions like, ‘If only Kuiussi or his designate may speak in the name of their community, how do they come by this authority? If his speech has power, where does the power come from?’ What is most important in understanding speeches like Kuiussi’s is the origin of such oratory in the comprehension of language more generally and how communication serves people in their daily lives.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“For example, we need to think in certain ways before we can have language. Language does not enable all thought. In fact, it is partially parasitic on thought. Even though language contributes to human thought, thinking nevertheless goes on in non-human heads also, just as it went on in pre-human hominid”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“It is hard to believe that humans waited until their vocal abilities were improved through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution before they thought to put this mechanism to work. Evolution is a tinkering process, in which biology responds gradually to a”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Native speakers will try to invent a meaning for it. They will do this not just because it resembles an actual English sentence, but also because humans expect all sentences to have meaning. Someone hearing me utter this sentence will assume that, since I have a mind like theirs and since I am a member of their culture, then I must intend for them to understand me.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“What we see as brain specialization could result from the order in which we experience things in our personal development. We know now”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“The lesson is that parts of the brain develop in each individual as the homebase for multiple, though related, tasks, such as language, motor control, sequential ordering, and the like.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Whatever is responsible for the localization or specialization of different regions of the brain for different cognition functions, it does not seem to be the result of specific, genetically determined”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“show that the ‘visual cortex,’ the region of the brain usually associated with vision in sighted individuals, can be used for non-visual tasks, in particular language, in blind subjects, as well as for Braille-reading.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Moreover, new evidence currently being gathered suggests the opposite – that we use different parts of the brain for multiple, diverse functions.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Many of the divorces in the world are at least partially caused by poor communication – misunderstandings abound between people because their feelings and thoughts are so often inadequately communicated, even in principle, by the languages that they speak. Part of this is cultural, part gender-difference-based, and a lot is due to the vagueness and ambiguity inherent in language. This is further evidence that language evolved because evolution never creates perfection, only adaptations that are better than those which came before and are ‘good enough’ to help us survive longer than our contemporaries.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Languages are the imperfect outputs of the thinking of bipedal primates, refined gradually by the tasks they perform.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“fact there is evidence that culture can affect genes, thus enriching the process of natural selection. Anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd have made the case that ‘the process of cultural evolution has played an active, leading role in the evolution of genes.’ If they are correct, then culture affects our biological evolution and our genes. And our genes are the alphabet by which their syntax writes the outline of our lives. The discussion”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Language: The Cultural Tool explores one simple idea: that all human languages are tools. Tools to solve the twin problems of communication and social cohesion. Tools shaped by the distinctive pressures of their cultural niches – pressures that include cultural values and history and which in many cases account in many cases for the similarities and differences between languages. First,”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“They reason that once the number of neurons in the human brain passed some unspecified threshold, syntactic processing – ordering and grouping of bits of information – might have just ‘happened.’ As these folks rightly remind us, we just do not know what kind of chain reaction the compression of 1010 (100 billion) neurons, with all their attendant axons, dendrites, and synapses, into a brain the size of a grapefruit might have caused.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Thus language rarities bring us face to face with the mirror and the reality of the shortcomings of our deepest efforts to generalize.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“Is there any explanation for anomalies that escape the boundaries of our theories? Linguistic rarities are marks of cultural distinction. We do not need to say that they were produced in their current form to satisfy some cultural need. They may have been. But probably for most, at least many, rarities we will never know.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“We need, as a minimum, to identify languages which are at risk and then we must learn enough about each of them to produce a dictionary, a grammar, and a written form of them, to train native speakers of these languages as teachers and linguists, and to secure government support for protecting and respecting these languages and their speakers. A daunting task. But it is vital.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool

“When they lose their will to live, when the languages of these endangered peoples pass from history without a detailed record, the whole of humanity loses an element of the tapestry from which our history is torn. Our species is less smart, less robust, and less healthy, and more threatened after the death of any language or culture.”
― Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool