"Dead language" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a dead language, and a horde of shysters! I'm afraid of law in this land; we're too new and too far away from things. It puts too much power in too few hands. Heretofore we men up here have had recourse to our courage and our Colts, but we'll have ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... were, memoria technica, which could easily be remembered, and would recall the fuller expositions that had been based upon them. Shortly after the Buddha's time the Brahmins had their s[u]tras in Sanskrit, already a dead language. He purposely put his into the ordinary conversational idiom of the day, that is to say, into P[a]li. When the Buddha died these sayings were collected together by his disciples into what they call the Four Nik[a]yas, or "collections." ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... in the dead language that befitted one cut off from life, to whom Dutch was never aught but the unintelligible jargon of an unspiritual race, he was leaving his house on a bleak evening when one clapped him on the shoulder, and turning in amaze, he was still more mazed to find, for the first ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Versification in a dead language is an exotic, a far-fetched, costly, sickly imitation of that which elsewhere may be found in healthful and spontaneous perfection. The soils on which this rarity flourishes are in general as ill-suited to the production of vigorous native poetry as the flower-pots of a hot-house to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... writers string intelligent words together in an unintelligent manner, and thereby give the reader an opportunity to read anything into them that his preconceived thoughts may dictate. Metaphysical gibberish is a rudimentary survival of the practise of reading to the people in a dead language. The doctors continue the plan by writing ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... learned! He seems to know, to know surprisingly well. He seems keenly versed in the law, able quickly to turn the tables upon their catch questions. But then it can't be the real article of learning, because He hasn't been in our established schools. He has no sheepskin in a dead language with our learned doctors' names learnedly ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... dead child, whose memory would never die out of her warm heart, and good Mr. Bond, who had always seemed to her so far above all other mortals—and Pat, too, who was, she thought, the impersonation of all that was beautiful and good; but the "breaking of the heart of ye" was a dead language to her, saving when it referred to some terrible affliction. Don't talk to Nannie about that, yet, Biddy. You're both better off with the kind mistress, and the nice home, and the warmth and comfort all about you, than you would be with ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful book. For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the young pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets. He came to feel that there had never been so wonderful a book written by man. To its haunting beauty, its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly —drinking it in like one bewitched. ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... language of their conquerors, and presently it came to pass that not even the native Egyptian remembered the elusive secrets of his own written language. Egyptian, as a spoken tongue, remained, in a modified form, as Koptic, but at about the beginning of our era the classical Egyptian had become a dead language. No one any longer wrote in the hieroglyphic, hieratic, or demotic scripts; in a word, the hieroglyphic writing was forgotten. The reader of Professor Maspero's pages has had opportunity to learn how this secret was discovered in the nineteenth century. This information is further amplified in the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... his bondage to physical love. Had he lived longer he might have invaded other worlds. His recasting of Hyperion opens with a cry of distrust in the artist who is content to live in the little world of his art. His very revulsion against the English of Milton was a revulsion against the dead language of formal beauty. But it is in formal beauty—the formal beauty especially of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, which has never been surpassed in literature—that his own achievement lies. He is great among the pagans, not among the prophets. Unless we keep ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd |
