Quotes About History

When the Greek translation of the Pentateuch was made, /Ä¢/ was still a distinct phoneme, but when the remaining books were translated, it may no longer have been pronounced, surviving exclusively in public reading of the Bible before finally disappearing completely.

The Proto-Canaanite ... seems to have employed 27 different characters. The Ugaritic alphabet from around the 14th century BCE uses 30 characters ... Phoenician had by the 12th century BCE already dropped five characters ... 22 consonantal phonemes.

Palestino-Tiberian tradition ... Ashkenazi opted for it, although they also introduced significant modifications.

The Tiberian system became more and more dominant until it completely ousted its Palestino-Tiberian counterpart around the middle of the fourteenth century.

Sumerian substratum is obvious not only in the use of a cuneiform system of writing, but also in the weakness of Laryngeal and Pharyngeal consonants in Akkadian

The earliest inscriptions in Hebrew date from the tenth BCE.

The oldest Phoenician inscriptions date from around 1100 BCE.

It is noticeable that the Phoenician terms are often shared with Ugaritic.

The inscription of King Mar'alqais , found south of Damascus and dated at 328 CE, is usually said to be the first document in Arabic.

Phoenician writing is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite system, and from these developed the Palaeo-Hebrew script (c. 800 BCE) and the Aramaic script (c. 700 BCE), which was adopted by Hebrew after Babylonian exile.

The earliest Hebrew texts that have reached us date from the end of the second millennium BCE.

Archaic Hebrew ... earliest inscriptions dating as far back as the close of the second millennium BCE.

There have been various attempts to reconstruct the vocalization and pronunciation of classical biblical Hebrew, which certainly differs considerably from that established by the Masoretes fifteen centuries later.

Various attempts have been made, with differing degrees of success, to reconstruct pre-exilic Hebrew, including its morphology.

Some of the more outstanding features of Ugaritic are its preservation of most of the Proto-Semitic consonantal phonemes.

Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.

Wars are facts we cannot fuck away, Perry; nor laugh away, either.

We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies / all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.

Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time.

Then I understood the thing I'd never grasped back in those days, when I was young, before I lived in history. When I was young, I'd wanted to be ephemeral, I'd wanted the moment, to live in just the glorious moment, the rush of blood, the applause. Pluck the day. Eat the peach. Tomorrow never comes. But, oh yes, tomorrow does come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you.

Pornography, like marriage and the fictions of romantic love, assists the process of false universalising. Its excesses belong to that timeless, locationless area outside history, outside geography, where fascist art is born. Nevertheless, there is no question of an aesthetics of pornography. It can never be art for art's sake. Honourably enough, it is always art with work to do.

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.