Amos Oz Quotes

Every language has influences and is an influence.

English has borrowed from everywhere and now goes everywhere.

I work in Hebrew. Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages. Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English. The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages. Every language has influences and is an influence.

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.

Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

The words you can't find, you borrow.

Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them.

English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.

Funny how words in one language get used in another language. For example, 'scotch' in Russian is tape and 'pampers' means diapers.

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

The way you pronounce words the Puerto Rico way, it's not really global for music. Colombians speak some of the best Spanish in the world. So having a Colombian next to me every time I write makes my music more international.

Will America be the death of English? I'm glad I asked me that. My well-thought-out mature judgment is that it will.

The force of a language does not consist of rejecting what is foreign but of swallowing it.

A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

I curse all negative purism that tells me not to use a word from another language that either expresses something that my own language cannot or does that in a more delicate manner.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.

The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.