2013/6/27 rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com>: > I am looking for a quote > (from Whorf/Sapir/Wittgenstein/Humboldt dunno... that 'school') > > It goes something like this: > > What characterizes a language is not what we can say in it but what we must > -- like it or not -- say. > [...]
Hi, I belive, the author is Roman Jakobson, see the respective post about this very question: http://linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-32.html There seem to be several variations, Another remarkable linguist Eugenio Coseriu mentions this in his paper (Sprache: Strukturen und Funktionen ... Tübingen 1979, p. 119). The German text is besides mentioning Jakobson almost fully equivalent to you original quote: "R. Jakobson bemerkt mit Recht, daß sich die Sprachen nicht durch das, was sie sagen können, unterscheiden, sondern durch das, was sie sagen müssen." http://books.google.cz/books?id=JkGCkC8RYcEC p. 119 hth, vbr -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
