Quotations Concerning Language Creation
Creating a new hobby language doesn't affect natural languages any more than playing Monopoly affects the economy.
(In response to this article)
~M.S. Soderquist, CONLANG-L posting (excerpt), Dec 19, 2009
Invent a new language anyone can understand.
~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Challenges to Young Poets" (excerpt)
In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!
~Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra!
...und in irgend einer fernen Zukunft wird es eine neue Sprache, zuerst als Handelssprache, dann als Sprache des geistigen Verkehres überhaupt, für Alle geben, so gewiss, als es einmal Luft-Schifffahrt giebt.
...and in a future as far removed as one may wish, there will be a new language which will first serve as a means of business communication, later as a vehicle for intellectual relations, just as certainly as there will be some day travel by air.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, "Anzeichen höherer und niederer Cultur," Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1876)
(Nietzsche's skeptical late-nineteenth-century prophecy of the possibility of both an international language and air travel.)
At some point in the next century the number of invented languages will probably overtake the number of surviving natural languages.
~Cullen Murphy, "Against All Odds: The Implacable in Pursuit of the Improbable" Atlantic Monthly, October 1995.
(Murphy is referring to the proliferation of international auxiliary languages.)
They have been at a great feast
of languages, and stolen the scraps.
~ Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (Act V, Scene 1)
(Although not technically referring to language creation, this quote could be taken out of context and interpreted as such.)
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