User:Mark Dingemanse/quotes

In my opinion, the English-language Wikipedia is not, and really has never been just an English-language encyclopedia. Instead, just as English is the primary language for international commerce, for science, for other academic subjects, and for aviation, the English-language Wikipedia is an International encyclopedia that is written in the English language. That is the reason that there are numerous users on the Wikipedia whose primary language is not English, but they have still chosen to spend most of their time and effort editing articles in the English-language Wikipedia.

The little star is beside the big star.

Ŋwɔɔní mɛ̀ɛ́ ńtáán, li sì ɲ̀jà li cyiìnni te mɛ́.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that nobody asked me (and not for the first time) what I thought was the characteristic doctrine of twentieth century philosophy of mind/language. I was ready for the question.

The possibility of thought comes with company. That there are lakes, mountains, sinkholes and the like presumably doesn't depend on there being an 'objective test of correctness and failure'; still less on there being an interpreter to apply it. Either a mountain is there or it isn't. But, because facts about the mind are epistemically constituted, they lack full ontological autonomy. All you need to have a sinkhole is a glacier; but you need an interpreter to have a thought. Very surprisingly, it takes two even to think about changing a light bulb.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Dùngììn máárrá góshkó gáályá.

Núnyá gale núnyá gódó.

A theorist about language may approach his native tongue, as it were from outside, regarding its genius as a thing that has no claim on him and advocating wholesale alterations of its idiom and spelling in the interests of commercial convenience or scientific accuracy. That is one thing.

A great poet, who has 'loved, and been well nurtured in, his mother tongue', may also make great alterations in it, but his changes of the language are made in the spirit of the language itself: he works from within. The language which suffers, has also inspired the changes. That is a different thing — as different as the works of Shakespeare are from Basic English. It is the difference between alteration from within and alteration from without: between the organic and the surgical.

[J]azz challenges what we mean in an era so dominated by special effects because jazz musicians understand that, when all the hot air of talking is done, the truest special effect in the arts is always the human being.