Quotes About Culture

In India, a bride burning-- to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry-- takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.

Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.

A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations.

Latin could make no headway with the sophisticates of the eastern Mediterranean, who spoke Greek and Aramaic, but it was quickly embraced by the illiterate peoples of Gaul and Spain.

Celts appear to have been literate only where they had neighbours who could teach them.

over half the languages in the world, for example, have fewer than five thousand speakers, and over a thousand languages have under a dozen.

From the language point of view, the present population of the world is not six billion, but something over six thousand.

Languages make possible both the living of a common history, and also the telling of it.

Languages change, as they pass from the lips of one generation to the next, but there is nothing about this process of transmission which makes for decay or extinction. Like life itself, each new generation can receive the gift of its language afresh. And so it is that languages, unlike any of the people who speak them, need never grow infirm, or die. Every language has a chance of immortality, but this is not to say that it will survive for ever.

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.

for all we know the origin may have been due to a genius like that of Sequoya, the illiterate Cherokee who in the nineteenth century AD took the fact of English literacy as a proof of concept, and proceeded then to develop a syllabary for his own language from first principles.

A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people's view of the world must also be changing.

The Germans who remained Pagan – the Franks, Angles, Saxons and Jutes – worshipped Wotan (or Wodin) as their chief god, together with other deities such as Thor (god of thunder), Tiwaz (god of war), Freya (goddess of fertility), and Saeter (a water-god). We derive the names of most our days from these Germanic gods: Tuesday (Tiwaz's day), Wednesday (Wodin's day), Thursday (Thor's day), Friday (Freya's day), Saturday (Saeter's day).

In fact, it was not until after Aquinas, in the 14th and 15th centuries, that the playing of musical instruments became a widespread, regular and accepted feature of ordinary Western worship.

To the Greeks [the Macedonians] were uncouth, semi-civilized barbarians. The Macedonians for their part despised the Greeks as effete, wishy-washy Greeklings. Both regarded the Thracians as scarcely capable of walking on their hind legs.

As far as I can tell, dumping soda on people is the equivalent of 'Hi, it's nice to meet you' in this part of the world. Frankly, I think standard greetings work better, but what do I know?

with every passing year she found herself wondering more and more where all the good guys had gone. Or even if there really was such a thing anymore. Where were the guys who didn't expect you to sleep with them after only a date or two? Or guys who believed that picking up the check on a first date was a classy thing to do? Or even a guy with a somewhat decent job and plans for the future?

Beauty might prevail in the very short term, but in the medium and longer terms, cultural norms - primarily those values and norms influenced by family - were more important.

Even his highly emotional Italian mother didn't believe that true love could blossom overnight. Like his brothers and sisters-in-law, she wanted nothing more for him than to marry and start a family, but if he showed up at her doorstep and said that he'd met someone two days ago and knew she was the one for him, his mother would smack him with a broom, curse in Italian, and drag him to church, sure that he had some serious sins that needed confessing.

I don't know what normal really means. I think everyone has his own definition, and it's shaped by culture, by family and friends, by character and experience, by events and a thousand other things. What's normal for one person isn't normal for another

In college, there aren't many guys like that, and why would there be? When girls just give it away for nothing? I mean, I can understand why you'd sleep with someone if you love them, but if you barely know them? What's the point? It just cheapens it.

You know my last name, but I didn't catch yours." "Danko," she said. Then, anticipating his next question: "My dad is from Slovakia." "That's near Kansas, right?

Because of what I did and where I came from, people just assumed I'd climbed every mountain in my country.

My favorite food is dahl bhat, the only Nepalese food you can eat on all the expeditions. Everyone from the mountaineering community would know this!