Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.

At first I was rather unwilling to study Latin grammar. It seemed absurd to waste time analyzing every word I came across — noun, genitive, singular, feminine — when its meaning was quite plain. I thought I might just as well describe my pet in order to know it — order, vertebrate; division, quadruped; class, mammalia; genus, felinus; species, cat; individual, Tabby. But as I got deeper into the subject, I became more interested, and the beauty of the language delighted me.

Speaking Latin properly is indeed to be held in the highest regard – not just because of its own merits, but in fact because it has been neglected by the masses. For it is not so much Noble to know Latin as it is disgraceful not to know it.

I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. … In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.

The language, of course, is quaint and antiquated, so that the beauty of many of its golden phrases will scarcely be perceived at the present day, but it is impossible not to be charmed with the genuine sentiment, the delightful artlessness and urbanity, which prevail throughout it. The descriptions of Nature too, with which it is embellished, are given with a truth, a discrimination, and a freshness, worthy of the most cultivated periods of the art.

Language is its own music.

"As a matter of fact, no other language in the world has received such praise as the Lithuanian language. The garlands of high honour have been taken to Lithuanian people for inventing, elaborating, and introducing the most highly developed human speech with its beautiful and clear phonology. Moreover, according to comparative philology, the Lithuanian language is best qualified to represent the primitive Aryan civilization and culture".

I sing in the language of the Heart. It's an invented language that I've had for a very long time. I believe I started singing in it when I was about 12. Roughly that time. And I believed that I was speaking to God when I sang in that language.

Her voice was slightly accented but her French was perfect. Someone who'd not just learned the language but loved it. And it showed with every syllable. Gamache knew it was impossible to split language from culture. That without one the other withered. To love the language was to respect the culture.

"Lament" is in some ways a praise song, a love poem to the English language, which, together with other languages like Spanish and Chinese, I continue to view as a wonderful achievement of the human species. The English language is capable of overcoming the separate identities that divide us even as it sometimes is deployed in erecting those separations.

In the current situation it seems improbable that one could make a priest appreciate, especially at the beginning of his formation, the value of Latin as a language endowed with nobility of structure and words, able to foster a concise, rich, harmonious style, full of majesty and dignity, which allows for clarity and gravity, able to advance every form of culture, the humanitatis cultus, among peoples.

Beautiful language! Love's peculiar, own,
But only to the spring and summer known.

I've written a great deal about that whole issue of dead language, the oppressor's language, a language that is no longer useful, and the need to try to find a new language, a common language, if you will. It's the question of associations with words and of the history of words, and how they come down to us and how we go on with them. But I'm beginning to think and talk a lot more again about that which goes along with language and poetry-which is music, the vibration of a voice. I see that intonation, that vocal quality, as something that is very personal, out of the self, and then combines with the many traditions, the many histories that we've been exposed to, that we come out of.

By the way, our nightingale language ranks second in the world in its melodiousness.