Famous Quotes & Sayings

Nicholas Ostler Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 4 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Nicholas Ostler.

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Famous Quotes By Nicholas Ostler

Nicholas Ostler Quotes 145887

Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers. — Nicholas Ostler

Nicholas Ostler Quotes 220294

Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God. — Nicholas Ostler

Nicholas Ostler Quotes 924802

As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories. — Nicholas Ostler

Nicholas Ostler Quotes 2080086

Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai; — Nicholas Ostler