Language Comparison Quotes

The President [George W. Bush] speaks Spanish almost as well as he speaks English.

He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals.

I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

I start by using Chinese and many of the sounds of other languages are similar.

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

French sounds flat. In English, you can play with pitch.

I'm getting to enjoy the mentality of the British, the sarcasm, the dry humour. There are so many more ways of articulating yourself than in German.

For example, in Malay, there are pronunciations that are similar to Chinese.

From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer.

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin - a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans.

Even if I think in English, it's more a language of acting than French.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

English may be the fastest moving language in the world, but there are plenty of concepts, sensations and everyday occurrences which lack a pithy word to describe them. Take the clunkiness of 'the day before yesterday' and 'the day after tomorrow': German provides single words for both.

I lived for a year in Scotland. British sign language is very different from American.

Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.

Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England.

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either.

This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.

French is the most beautiful,” he said, “and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other.

If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.

The German language is the organ among the languages.