I did my first movie, 'The Mambo Kings,' in America without speaking the language. I learned the lines phonetically. I had an interpreter actually just to understand directions from my director.
A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It's all interrelated, and it's all evolutionary.
Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.
Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions.
Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.
I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them.
Americans and French are notoriously monolingual, especially earlier generations. Language is a sense of pride in both cultures. I think that the French and Americans are like brothers or sisters who are so similar that they irritate one another.
Language is essentially tribal, so jargon can actually be a really good thing because it unites people.
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 Malays can hardly be said to have an indigenous literature, for it is almost entirely derived from Persia, Siam, Arabia, and Java. Arabic is their sacred language.
However, when Java is promoted as the sole programming language, its flaws and limitations become serious.
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.
People call him a terrorist, but you can use language to do many things and say many things about people, but John Brown was a hero.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar. It's the most punderful language because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass that makes a lingo good for punning.
Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.
For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.
I want to keep talking about my people and my country in my own language.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
