Quotes About Semitic

Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means Cod, so Babel means 'Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic, imitating someone who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is full of puns.

Akkadian, the language spoken by Sargon I, the first Assyrian king in 2300 BC, is a close relative of the Arabic spoken by his successor in this same land, Saddam Hussein, in AD 2000; another close relative, the Middle East's old lingua franca, Aramaic, bridges the gap between the decline of Akkadian around 600 BC and the onset of Arabic with the Muslims around AD 600. They are all sister languages within the very close Semitic family.

Ideology, wherever it exists, is almost invariably pressed into the service of local geopolitics. In short, we witness the role of anti-Byzantine impulses facilitating the Islamic conquest in many of the Semitic regions.

He was aware, he said, that humiliation was a deep wound. We are Semitic, both of us, Israelis and Palestinians together.

Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parable therein...

The two great Semitic peoples," he said, "have a great common future." If the Jews did not assure that both sides lived in harmony, he warned friends in the Zionist movement, the struggle would haunt them in decades to come.78 Once again, he was labeled naïve.

What surprises historians of language is that Arabic has been able to preserve a morphology already exemplified by Hammurabi's code in the nineteenth or eighteenth century B.C., and a phonetic system which perpetuates, apart from one single sound, the very rich sound range borne witness to by the most ancient Semitic alphabets discovered.

Various Turkish people invaded southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and carved an empire for themselves from lands occupied by the indigenous Semitic and Indo-European inhabitants.

The fount and breeding-place of the Semites was Arabia.

The farther back we trace the Egyptian language the more affinities it reveals with the Semitic tongues of the Near East.

Those religions arose among peoples speaking three closely related languages, termed Semitic languages: Aramaic (the language of Christ and the Apostles), Hebrew, and Arabic, respectively.

Although it telescopes much history to put it this way, Chalcedon may be said to have marked the successful translation of the Christian faith out of its Semitic milieu (where words and concepts were shaped primarily by the revelation of the Old Testament) into the Hellenistic milieu (where words and concepts were shaped primarily by traditions of Greek thought and Roman might).