Language Perfection Quotes

If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought.

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

I'm not supposed to be phonetically correct or enunciate perfectly.

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naive or a salesman.

Perfect grammar - persistent, continuous, sustained - is the fourth dimension, so to speak; many have sought it, but none has found it.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

Greek is doubtless the most perfect [language] that has been contrived by the art of man.

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

The French language, which has suffered much hitherto from neglect on the part of those who might have rendered it the most perfect of modern tongues, is now more capable than ever of taking its high place, owing to the great number of persons who possess a special knowledge of the advantages which it enjoys and who can augment these advantages … [I have] arranged meetings of scholars whose decisions in these matters have met with my hearty approval, and that in order to put these decisions into execution and render the French language not only elegant but capable of treating all the arts and sciences, it would only be necessary to perpetuate these gatherings. This could be done with great advantage should it please us to sanction them, to permit rules and regulations to be drawn up for the order of procedure to be observed, and to reward those who compose the association by some honorable marks of our favor.

The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.

'See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.

I want to speak English perfectly. In fact, I want to speak English just like I fight, and, until that moment, I find it very hard to do an interview solely in English.