"Unaccented" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in unaccented syllables, each of the long vowels has a slightly shortened sound, as in fatality, negotiate, intonation, refutation, indicated by a dot above the sign for the long sound; (in a few words, such as digress, the sound is not ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... divisions, the accents of the bar, and, in many cases, the subdivisions, and the half-accents. I need hardly here explain what is meant by the "accents" (accented and unaccented parts of a bar); I am presupposing ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... seems best to treat the rest as amphibrachic, with a superfluous unaccented syllable at the beginning of the line. Taylor adds: "The song is very carefully divided. To each of the three things, mountain, forest, fountain, four lines are given, in ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... for women after the war, because they would have so much more important a part to do than before in the useful work of the world. "Ah, yes," she said, "perhaps so. But with the men all gone what shall we do when we want to be petted?" She made two sweet unaccented syllables of petted in her ingenue French accent and added: "For you know women were made to be pet-ted." There was a bewildered second under the machine gun fire of the eyes when her companion considered seriously her theory. ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... of more than one syllable the stress accent is generally, though not universally, on the last but one. {54} The vowel of this syllable has usually its plain, clear long or short sound. The vowels of the unaccented syllables are usually obscure in the case of two of the broad vowels (a, o), and short in the case of the thin vowels (e, i, y) and of u, unless they are combinations of two vowels, in which case they are always long; but e in a final unaccented syllable is ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... Sylvia. His song is very plain and simple, but remarkably pure and tender, and might be indicated by straight lines, thus, —— ——/——; the first two marks representing two sweet, silvery notes, in the same pitch of voice, and quite unaccented; the latter marks, the concluding notes, wherein the tone and inflection are changed. The throat and breast of the male are a rich black, like velvet, his face yellow, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... may have been the case. The comparative carelessness, which is characteristic of conversation, affects our pronunciation of words. When there is a stress accent, as there was in Latin, this is especially liable to be the case. We know in English how much the unaccented syllables suffer in a long word like "laboratory." In Latin the long unaccented vowels and the final syllable, which was never protected by the accent, were peculiarly likely to lose their full value. As a result, in conversational Latin certain final consonants tended to drop ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... dominating the others, being perhaps Amor himself; while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls ranged round him on the ground—obvious reminders of the last stage of all, at which he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity between the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of the personages—the one aiding the other to express the moment of pause in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all that the very whirlwind of ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... reader will now be able to fix the prosodical value of the line quoted above with unerring security. For metrical purposes it syllabifies into: A-ka-mul-vaj-da fi kal-bi wa sa-ru, containing three short and eight long quantities. The initial unaccented a is short, for the same reason why the syllables da and wa are so, that is, because it corresponds to an Arabic letter, the Hamzah or silent h, moved by Fathah. The syllables ka, fi, bi, sa, ru are long for the same reason why the syllables ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... to step airily forward, when there reached her ear the voices of persons below. She recognized as one of them the slow unaccented tones ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... run of the unaccented French: 'Son amour, mon ami': drove the significance of the bitterness of the life she had left behind her burningly through him. This was to have fled from a dragon! was the lover's thought: he perceived the motive of her flight: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... [Footnote: The heroic couplet consists of two iambic pentameter lines that rime. By "pentameter" is meant that the line has five feet or measures; by "iambic," that each foot contains two syllables, the first short or unaccented, the second long or accented.] which dominated the fashion of English poetry for the next century. The couplet had been used by earlier poets, Chaucer for example; but in his hands it was musical and unobtrusive, a minor part of a complete ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... believe, the only English poem of any length written in this metre since Drayton's Polyolbion. Browning's metre has scarcely the flexibility of the best French verse, but he allows himself occasionally two licenses not used in French since the time of Marot: (1) the addition of an unaccented syllable at the end of the first half of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... English verse is built up through accent alone, but, though this principle differs entirely from that of the ancients, who depended on the length of the syllable, we still cling to the names with which they distinguished the different feet. It will be discovered that by combining accented and unaccented syllables into groups of two, three and four an immense variety of feet can be produced. In fact the Roman poets made use of about thirty. In English verse we disregard the four-syllabled foot altogether and make use only of ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... gown of her own making,—the secret toil of many a long night,—amateurishly fashioned from some cheap yellow calico the doctor had sent her, yet fitting her wonderfully, and showing every curve of her graceful figure. Unaccented by a corset,—an article she had never known,—even the lines of the stiff, unyielding calico had a fashion that was nymph-like and suited her unfettered limbs. Doctor Ruysdael was profoundly moved. Though a philosopher, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte |
