When California passes a law saying that English is the official language, it can only mean one thing: That English is no longer the official language.
I chose English-speaking and English-thinking people to take decisions for Hindi programmes. It was a mistake.
Speaking Spanish isn't a benefit in Hollywood.
Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.
I'm the minority in my house sometimes. My wife is Swedish, and we go to Sweden and everyone is rattling off in Swedish. It's like, 'OK, I can just read a book.'
It's problematic being an Arab who writes in Hebrew.
I think that in the past there has been a kind of cultural resistance to Latin because it's associated with elitism.
When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
The English book world is relatively closed to translation, so only a small amount of foreign language work can come in.
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.
