You can usually tell the focus of a culture from the vocabulary of its language.

I could go into the whole eskimos and countless words for snow thing, but everybody knows that, and I feel like furthering your classical education. So I'm going to pick the Romans.

Their culture was hugely based on warfare and agriculture, and their vocabulary in these areas is extensive.
There are countless translations for a word like ' to kill' - for example 'caedere', 'occidere', 'necare', 'interficere', 'concidere' and 'exanimare'.
There are many versions of the basic word for ploughing - 'arare' - namely: 'obarare', 'circumarare', 'perarare' and 'exarare'.

It is easy to see that these things were important for the Roman people.
When we come to a word like 'littera', however, Lingua Latina shows to be what my prof lovingly calls "semantically under-determinate".
In a culture of soldiers and farmers, things like writing, literature, science and stuff simply did not hold enough importance to warrant their own word.

So littera can mean:
- Letter as in a, b, c, d
- Letter as in 'Dear Johnny'
- Literature
- Science

Boy. Really makes you wonder how the Roman empire managed to last 2000 years.

Proof that a comedy can still be funny after over 2400 years:

STREPSIADES: And Zeus? How do you keep it with him? Is he no longer the God of the Olympus?

SOCRATES: What do you mean by Zeus? What is this insanity? There is no Zeus!

STREPSIADES: Do I hear right? But who is it bringing us the rain? You'll have to explain that one to me.

SOCRATES: Only those, of course! And that that's how it is, I shall show you shortly. Well: where have you ever seen that it rains without the Clouds? But he'd have to rain out of the blue sky when the clouds are in Pepperland!

STREPSIADES: By Apollo, this suits our case just fine and fits like a glove! And there I was thinking he'd piss through a sieve, and it rains!

From: Aristophanes, The Clouds, Verses 366 - 373. Translation into English by me, based off of the German translation by Otto Seel.