Peter Farb Quotes

Gestures and facial expressions do indeed communicate, as anyone can prove by turning off the sound on a television set and asking watchers to characterize the speakers from the picture alone.

The environment does not determine man's culture; it merely sets the outer limits and at the same time offers opportunities.

Food to a large extent is what holds a society together, and eating is closely linked to deep spiritual experiences.

In place of science, the Eskimo has only magic to bridge the gap between what he can understand and what is not known. Without magic, his life would be one long panic.

An inability to communicate has little to do with international friction-as is seen in the special ferocity of wars fought between people who speak the same language.

An invention or new combination can be successful only if all if the elements necessary for the recombination are present in the culture.

Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.

People who speak the same language can hate one another as easily as can people who speak unrelated languages.

Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo.

Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.

No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.