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language

Natural languages

Je parle espagnol à Dieu, italien aux femmes, français aux hommes et allemand à mon cheval.
(I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.)

-- Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, 1500-58 (attrib.)

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

-- Mark Twain , A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Artificial languages

Linguistic evolution is IMHO like biological evolution. It's inevitable, and we're all beneficiaries of its happening in the past. But the mechanism by which it operates can be pretty ugly, it has no inherent direction towards anything desirable, and no one's required to let it operate on something they're attached to without interference. ... No one's under obligation to avoid cancer treatment (or avoid reproduction afterwards) in the hopes of beefing up the cancer resistance of future generations, and no one's required to accept that, e.g., "imply" and "infer" are synonyms now, just because that might become correct usage in a generation or three.

-- Michael S. Schiffer, rec.arts.sf.written, May 2002

Programming languages

Book reviews

(see also under specific languages)

All nouns can be verbed. -- trad

Verbing weirds language. -- Bill Watterson , Calvin and Hobbes

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs. -- Peter Ellis, a.f.p

Language, n . The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

The Devil's Dictionary

, 1911