Edward Sapir
American anthropologist and linguist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved — nothing short of a finished form of expression for all communicable experience. This form may be endlessly varied by the individual without thereby losing its distinctive contours; and it is constantly reshaping itself as is all art. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.
—Edward Sapir, American anthropologist and linguist, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, 1921
Posted on September 27, 2000 at 7:48 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language moves down time in a current of its own making.
—Edward Sapir, American anthropologist and linguist, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, 1921
Posted on June 2, 1998 at 9:42 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language is itself the collective art of expression, a summary of thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions.
—Edward Sapir, American anthropologist and linguist, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, 1921
Posted on April 30, 1999 at 10:48 PM
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