Famous quotes containing the words fluent, irish and/or speakers:
“Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet to its god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought.”
—Havelock Ellis (1859–1939)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)