"Dead language" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of those numerous home-raised products in which well-read but talentless authors, in choice, but dead language, studiously and cautiously enunciated some 'profound' or 'vital and palpitating' idea, portrayed a so-called tragic conflict, and produced dulness ... an Asiatic dulness, like Asiatic cholera. Maria Nikolaevna listened patiently to half ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... people he is," granted Miss Prudence; "but when he was seven I was ten, I was a backward child and he used to read to me, so he is not a dead language to me." ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... ironical. They were not Greek in spirit and they ignored the training of the body. Thus what Wilhelm von Humboldt had chiefly aimed at accomplishing, he failed to do. It was not the power of Greek art that he brought into the schools but, in most cases, merely the philological study of a second dead language. The cause of his failure was that he had not discovered the educational method which could effectually secure his purpose. He had assumed that, in order to introduce the Greek spirit into education, it was sufficient to insist upon the linguistic ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... the Hebrew was a dead language while our Lord was on the earth, the Jews of Palestine speaking the Aramaic. For their use, translations of the Hebrew into the Aramaic, called Targums, were made. There is a great variety of these, and ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... it will be said, What can be the use of Sanskrit at the present day? Is not Sanskrit a dead language? And are not the Hindus themselves ashamed of their ancient literature? Do they not learn English, and do they not prefer Locke, and Hume, and Mill to their ancient ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... pointed out that even to the most uneducated amongst our people Latin is never a dead language to Catholics, and that the familiar prayers at Mass and public devotions make them at home in the furthest countries of the earth as soon as they are within the church doors. So far as this, it is a universal language for us, and even if it went no further than the world-wide ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... think nothing is so absurd, if you only inscribe them on a tomb. Why should extremely few persons, the least capable, perhaps, of sympathy, be invited to sympathize, while thousands are excluded from it by the iron grate of a dead language? Those who read a Latin inscription are the most likely to know already the character of the defunct, and no new feelings are to be excited in them; but the language of the country tells the ignorant who he was that lies under the turf before them; and, if he was a stranger, it naturalizes him ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... employed by the Northmen." ("The Landnamabok," vol. i., chap. 2.) An Italian poem Of A.D. 1190 refers to it as in use among the Italian sailors at that date. In the ancient language of the Hindoos, the Sanscrit—which has been a dead language for twenty-two hundred years—the magnet was called "the precious stone beloved of Iron." The Talmud speaks of it as "the stone of attraction;" and it is alluded to in the early Hebrew prayers as Kalamitah, the same name given it by the Greeks, ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... gravest amazement and alarm, and they had, despite the Prophet's final injunction, spent the remaining telegraphic hours of the day in despatching wires of frantic inquiry to the square. Madame, in particular, was evidently much upset, and expressed her angry agitation in a dead language that seemed positively to live again in fear and novelty of grammatical construction. Sir Tiglath had been a brilliant card to play in the prophetic game, although he had not achieved the Prophet's purpose of ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... physiognomy of our idiom in a fixed form. In vain do our literary Joshuas cry out to the language to stand still; languages and the sun do not stand still. The day when they become fixed, they are dead.—That is why the French of a certain contemporary school is a dead language. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... to turn sycophant for the first and last time? Nor was Boileau's contempt of modern Latin either injudicious or peevish. He thought, indeed, that no poem of the first order would ever be written in a dead language. And did he think amiss? Has not the experience of centuries confirmed his opinion? Boileau also thought it probable, that, in the best modern Latin, a writer of the Augustan age would have detected ludicrous improprieties. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
