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AFTER BABEL George Steiener, At various points a portentous musicality is…

- - - - I wonder, and is it in fact possible to separate language from those institutions which it largely informs and whose change is itself so often identified by linguistic description? steiner
      - At other moments, languages are strongly conservative. Such is the prescriptive weight of post-Cartesian syntax that the French Romantics, while proclaiming themselves rebels and pioneers, cast their plays in traditional alexandrines and hardly modified the armature of French prose.
      - Do languages wane, do their powers of shaping response atrophy? Are there linguistic reflexes which have slowed and lost vital exactitude ? The danger in putting the question this way is obvious : to think of the life and death of language in organic, temporal terms may be an animist fiction. Languages are wholly arbitrary sets of signals and conventionalized counters.
      - Words seem to go dead under the weight of sanctified usage. [...] Instead of acting as a living membrane, grammar and vocabulary become a barrier to new feeling.
        Did the language, with its presumably high proportion of immutable, - hieratic phraseology, no longer provide a usable, generative model of reality? 'Words, those guardians of meaning, are not immortal, they are not invulnerable,' wrote Adamov (1938)
      - In cases, language was 'new', [...] the poet, the chronicler, the philosopher gave to human behaviour and to the current of mental experience an unprecedented 'second life'¬ a life they soon found to be more enduring, more exhaustive of meaning, than either biological or social existence.
      - we more and more say and write what we actually do think and feel, and not what we intend to think or should desire to feel. Henry Sidgwick (1869)
        
        The sum of linguistic events is not
        only increased but qualified by each new event. When we think about language,[...] the object of our reflection alters in the process. [...] time and language are intimately related: they move and the arrow is never in the same place.
      - Words and values shift at bewildering speed