Semitic Languages Quotes & Sayings

The weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone; but without honesty, the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should be hunted down by every lover of righteousness. No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community. — Theodore Roosevelt

Archaism, in the linguistic order, is not, in any event, synonymous with simplicity of structure, very much to the contrary. Languages generally grow poorer with the passing oftime by gradually losing the richness of their vocabulary, the ease with which they can diversify various aspects of one and the same idea, and their power of synthesis, which is the ability to express many things with few words. In order to make up for this impoverishment, modern languages have become more complicated on the rhetorical level; while perhaps gaining in surface precision, they have not done as as regards content. Language historians are astonished by the fact that Arabic was able to retain a morphology attested to as early as the Code of Hammurabi, for the nineteenth to the eighteenth century before the Christian era, and to retain a phonetic system which preserves, with the exception of a single sound, the extremly rich sound-range disclosed by the most ancient Semitic alphabets discovered, [...] — Titus Burckhardt

Contrary to English which has two liquid phonemes, Asian languages have one liquid consonant which causes Asian speakers to have difficulty in hearing and producing /L/ and /R/ accurately. When we examine the pictographic script we observe that the sickle tool is represented by a staff-shaped pictograph signaling the letter 'L' and the head is represented by a head-shaped pictograph signaling the letter 'R'; it is as if the Asiatic culture got historically traumatized based on the cultural confrontation between the Aryan and Semitic traditions. If we look at Early Aramaic alphabet we observe that the 'R' looks like a serpent's head and 'L' looks like the sickle. If originally the script got developed from hieroglyphs, then it ought to operate in that same manner rather than being phonetically produced for example by the sound of cutting wheat for the letter 'R' as my friend Randy Simons suggested. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

Inspiration is the result of moments of insight and a key component of internal "drive. — Pearl Zhu

All you've got to do is decide to go and the hardest part is over. — Tony Wheeler

But the Semitic names did possess meaning in Semitic languages: they were the words for familiar objects ('aleph = ox, beth = house, gimel = camel, daleth = door, and so on). These Semitic words were related "acrophonically" to the Semitic consonants to which they refer: that is, the first letter of the word for the object was also the letter named for the object ('a, b, g, d, and so on). In addition, the earliest forms of the Semitic letters appear in many cases to have been pictures of those same objects. All these features made the forms, names, and sequence of Semitic alphabet letters easy to remember. Many — Jared Diamond

'tis He, arrayed In the soft light of his own smiles, which spread Like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon ... — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Brave hearts do not back down back off. — Sophocles

To Alef, the letter
that begins the alphabets
of both Arabic and Hebrew-
two Semitic languages,
sisters for centuries.
May we find the language
that takes us
to the only home there is -
one another's hearts.
...
Alef knows
That a thread
Of a story
Stitches together
A wound. — Ibtisam Barakat