There are four tongues worthy of the world’s use,” says the Talmud: “Greek for song, Latin for war, Syriac for lamentation, and Hebrew for ordinary speech.”
The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, king of Spain, archduke of Austria, and master of several European tongues, professed to speaking “Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”
Does language reflect the culture of a society in any profound sense, beyond such trivia as the number of words it has for snow or for shearing camels? And even more contentiously, can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts and perceptions? For most serious scholars today, the answer to all these questions is a resounding no. The dominant view among contemporary linguists is that language is primarily an instinct, in other words, that the fundaments of language are coded in our genes and are the same across the human race. Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language. Deep down, so runs the theory, all languages share the same universal grammar, the same underlying concepts, the same degree of systemic complexity.
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Definitions of Culture in English, French and German
Culture: cultivation, the state of being cultivated, refinement, the result of cultivation, a type of civilization. Chambers English dictionary
Kultur: The totality of intellectual and artistic achievements of a society. Störig German dictionary
Culture: The collection of means employed by man to increase his knowledge, develop and improve his mental faculties, notably judgment and taste. ATILF French dictionary
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A rose by any other name would smell as douce, γλνkó, édes, zoet, sladká, sød, ho, makea, magus, dolce, ngt, or even sweet.
Except for the sea, the only other thing that Homer calls “wine-looking” is . . . oxen
Mankind’s perception of color, he says increased “according to the schema of the color spectrum”: first came the sensitivity to red, then to yellow, then to green, and only finally to blue and violet. The most remarkable thing about it all, he adds, is that this development seems to have occurred in exactly the same order in different cultures all over the world.
The perception of the ancients, Magnus wrote, was similar to what modern eyes can see at twilight: colors fade, and even brightly colored objects appear in indefinite gray. The ancients would have perceived the world in this way even in full daylight.
According to the biblical etymology, Adam owes his name to the red tilled soil, adamah, from which he was made. But adamah derives from the Semitic word for “red,” adam, which
Guugu Yimithirr - aborigine language from which we get kangaroo
Heinrich Heine poem trans by john thomson and later by emma lazarus
A pine-tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.
It dreameth of a Palm Tree
Which far in the East alone,
In mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone.
The most famous of all odes to Jerusalem, written in twelfth-century Spain by Yehuda Halevy, a poet whom Heine revered.
Halevy’s opening line, “My heart is in the East, and I am in the farthest West.”
The original sense of “gender” had nothing to do with sex: it meant “type,” “kind,” “race”—in fact, “gender” has exactly the same origin as the words “genus” and “genre.
The African language Supyire from Mali has five genders: humans, big things, small things, collectives, and liquids. Bantu languages such as Swahili have up to ten genders, and the Australian language Ngan’gityemerri is said to have fifteen different genders, which include, among others, masculine human, feminine human, canines, non-canine animals, vegetables, drinks, and two different genders for spears (depending on size and material).
German: das - neuter ; der - masculine ; die - feminine
three primary colors on Japanese artists’ palettes are traditionally
aka (red), kiiro (yellow), and ao (blue).
Midori - green
Humans can see light only at a narrow band of wavelength between around 380 and 750 nanometers
Short-wave cones have their peak sensitivity around 425 nm—that is, on the border between violet and blue
Middle-wave cones, have their peak sensitivity at yellowish green, around 530 nm.
Long-wave cones have their peak sensitivity quite close to the middle-wave cones, in greenish yellow, at 565 nm.
Our low-light vision, however, is color-blind because there is just one type of rod. As the brain has nothing with which to compare the responses from the single type of rod, no color sensation can be produced
Our color vision goes back about thirty to forty million years.
Most mammals have dichromatic vision: they have only two types of cones,