J. Davidson - Planet Word

‘Oh no. No, no, no, no!’Zaha Bustema, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Learn well the language of the whites’Anonymous, Hawaii, 1896

‘In the old days,’Aju, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘At my home I speak Akha’Aju, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Irish golfer’, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘We next reached Skibbereen …’James Mahony, The Illustrated London News, 1847

‘I have been assured’Jonathan Swift, Modest Proposal (for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public) , Prometheus Books UK, September 1995

‘If we allow one of the finest’Douglas Hyde, An leabhar sgeulaigheachta , Dublin Gill, 1889

‘I would earnestly appeal’Douglas Hyde, The Necessity for De-anglicising Ireland, Academic Press, Leiden, 1994

‘The Gaelic League restored the language to its place’Michael Collins, The Path To Freedom , Talbot Press Ltd, Dublin 1922

‘to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature’Lady Augusta Persse Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography , GP Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, New York and London, 1913

‘as calm and collected as Queen Victoria’As quoted by Carmel Joyce, Inspirational Figures from Irish History (Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, Samuel Beckett, playwrights), World of Hibernia, 2000

‘You have to remember that Irish as a language was spoken up till the 1840s and 50s by many, perhaps the majority of Irish people’Declan Kiberd, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘I know that if you were to speak’Hugh Farley, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘I think that we have as a nation’ibid.

‘ “ nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil” ’ (‘Some say oc , others say si , others say oïl” ’)Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia (Cambridge Medieval Classics), translated by Steve Botterill, Cambridge University Press, 1996

‘The monarchy had reasons to resemble the Tower of Babel’Bertrand Barère, National Convention, 1794

‘My grandparents speak Breton too’Nicolas de la Casiniere, Ecoles Diwan, La Bosse du Breton, 1998

‘Instead of setting their ambitions’Frédéric Mistral, Speech to the Félibres of Catalonia as quoted by Jennifer Michael in Journal of American Folklore 111 , American Folklore Society, 1998

‘in recognition of the fresh originality’Frédéric Mistral, The Nobel Foundation, 1904

‘I was profoundly shocked’President Chirac, EU Summit, March 2006, as reported in Nicholas Watt and David Gow, ‘Chirac vows to fight growing use of English’ , Guardian , 25 March 2006

‘… because that is the accepted business language of Europe today’Ernest-Antoine Seilliere, as quoted in ‘Chirac upset by English address’, BBC News, 24 March 2006

‘But you know, what they, the regional languages, have lost is not too much’Marc Fumaroli, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Jesus said, “Love is everything” ’Dr Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Israeli is a very complex language’ibid.

‘The Hebrew language can live only if we revive the nation’Eliezer Ben Yehuda as quoted in Jew! Speak Hebrew , Aliyon, 2005, on the Jewish Agency for Israel website www.jafi.org.il

‘In a heavy atmosphere’David Yudeleviz, as quoted by Ilan Stavans ‘Crusoe in Israel’ , Pakn Treger: The magazine of the Yiddish Book Center , No. 58, December 2009, yiddishbookcenter.org

‘Yiddish speaks itself beneath Israeli’Dr Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Yiddish has not yet said its last word’Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lectures 1978 , Literature 1968–80, World Scientific Publishing Company, Singapore, 1993

‘There is one people — Jews … and its language is — Yiddish’I. L. Peretz, quoted in Dr Birnboym’s Vokhnblat #2, Czernowitz, 1908 (translated by Marvin Zuckerman and Marion Herbst from Nakhmen Meisel, Briv unredes fun , YKUF, New York, 1944)

‘It’s a great language for saying the man’s a dick’Stewie Stone, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘The nebach is the guy getting the water when you’re going on a football team’Ari Teman, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘For an older Jewish audience’Stewie Stone, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘I sent a rabbi a joke’Ari Teman, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘When one Jew meets another Jew’Stewie Stone, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Yiddish is basically our soul’ibid.

‘I grew up, and I was bah mitzvahed ’ ibid.

‘Hebrew comes from the vocal chords’ibid.

‘a serous and watery purgative motion’John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, The Royal Society, 1668, Thoemmes Continuum, Facsimile Ed edition, January 2002

‘I was taught that all men were brothers’Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof in a letter to N. Borovko, 1895, quoted by David Poulson in Origin of Esperanto July 1998

‘We believe it is a language’Littlewoods, BBC News, July 2008

‘If you lose a contract to a Moroccan rival’Jean Paul Nerriere, Parlez Globish , Eyrolles, 2006

‘It’s a proletarian and popular idiom’ibid.

‘The only jokes which cross frontiers’Jean Paul Nerriere, as quoted by Adam Sage, ‘Globish cuts English down to size’, The Times , December 2006

‘I am helping the rescue of French’Jean Paul Nerriere, Parlez Globish , Eyrolles, April 2006

‘To make up a non-human language’Mark Okrand, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘because there’s lots of zees and zots in science fiction’ibid.

‘We arrived on the set one day’ibid.

‘You have not experienced Shakespeare’ibid.

‘My son was born in 1994’ibid.

‘Well, he was learning it’Dr d’Ormond Speers, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘I would say something to him in Klingon’ibid.

‘The reason this language is so successful’Arika Okrent, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘Well, it’s given me a deeper appreciation’ibid.

‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’Max Weinreich, Der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt , New York, 1945

‘long e s and very slow’; ‘they don’t say their t s’Ian McMillan, Fry’s Planet Word , BBC 2011

‘harsh … it’s to do with the harsh winds’ibid.