"Polyglot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... devote themselves to the pursuit of liberal studies. By the time she was thirteen she knew—in addition to Latin—Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, and several other languages, and was so renowned for her linguistic attainments that she was called, familiarly, the "walking polyglot." When she was fifteen, her father began to invite the most learned men of Bologna to assemble at his house and listen to her essays and discussions upon the most difficult philosophical problems; in spite of the fact that ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the grand tour, Mr. Foker, Junior, had brought with him a polyglot valet, who took the place of Stoopid, and condescended to wait at dinner, attired in shirt fronts of worked muslin, with many gold studs and chains, upon his master and the elders of the family. This man, who was of no particular country, and spoke all languages ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... account the evidence which exists as to the ease with which unlettered savages gain or lose a language. Captain Erskine, in his interesting "Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific," especially remarks upon the "avidity with which the inhabitants of the polyglot islands of Melanesia, from New Caledonia to the Solomon Islands, adopt the improvements of a more perfect language than their own, which different causes and accidental communication still continue to bring to them;" ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... in A.D. 1000 and for many centuries served as a bulwark against Ottoman Turkish expansion in Europe. The kingdom eventually became part of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed during World War I. The country fell under Communist rule following World War II. In 1956, a revolt and an announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact were met with a massive military intervention by Moscow. ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... pride in his linguistic accomplishments, or that he takes it otherwise than as a matter of course. Stevenson, writing from Mentone to his mother, 7 January 1874, said: "We have two little Russian girls, with the youngest of whom, a little polyglot button of a three-year-old, I had the most laughable little scene at lunch to-day. . . . She said something in Italian which made everybody laugh very much . . .; after some examination, she announced emphatically to the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... The polyglot disturbance that ensued baffles all description. Indeed, I should be puzzled to say exactly what took place, or after how many commands, defiances, threats, protestations, insults, and explanations, a semblance of peace was finally restored. I only know that, at ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... connection with his church, and he wished to know if there would be a chance for some of the young men who belonged to that lyceum. The Methodist clergyman came from a little patch of old native America which by a recent extension had been taken within the limits of the huge, polyglot, pleasure-loving city. His was a small church, most of the members being shipwrights, mechanics, and sailormen from the local coasters. In each case I assured my visitor that we wanted on the force men of the exact type which he ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... in the four quarters of the world. My hymn was "a simple psalm, so constructed as scarcely to exclude a truth, or to offend a prejudice; with special reference to the great event of this year, and yet so ordered that it can never be out of season." "This polyglot hymn at the lowest estimate is a philological curiosity: so many minds, with such diversity in similitude rendering literally into all the languages of the earth one plain psalm, a world-wide call to man to render ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... command of but a few verbs, all of which, on her lips, became irregular, managed to express a polyglot personality as vivid as her husband's was effaced. Her only idea of intercourse with her kind was to organize it into bands and subject it to frequent displacements; and society smiled at her for these exertions like an infant vigorously ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... pertinacious, pharmaceutic, phenomenal, phlegmatic, phraseology, pictorial, piquant, pique, plagiarize, platitudinous, platonic, plebeian, plenipotentiary, plethora, pneumatic, poignant, polity, poltroon, polyglot, pontifical, portentous, posterior, posthumous, potent, potential, pragmatic, preamble, precarious, precocious, precursor, predatory, predestination, predicament, preemptory, prelate, preliminary, preposterous, prerequisite, prerogative, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... these isles, for which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. Bree—and chief among them the dark Orpheus, and the yellow Hippolais, surpassing the black-cap, and almost equalling the nightingale, for richness and variety of song—the polyglot warbler which penetrates, in summer, as far north as the shores of the British Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty miles of sea, after a land journey—and by night, too, as all ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... the sacred writings has been diffused, will be observed from the catalogue of the various editions of the Bible, from the first impression by Fust, in 1462, to the present time; in which will be contained the polyglot editions of Spain, France, and England, those of the original Hebrew, the Greek Septuagint, and the Latin Vulgate; with the versions which are now used in the remotest parts of Europe, in the country of the Grisons, in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... was considered a fine mansion on Lafayette place, adjoining the Astor Library. The sideboards were heaped with gold plate, and polyglot servants in livery stood obediently by at all times to respond to his merest nod. But he cared little for this show, except in that it surrounded him with an atmosphere of power. His frugality did not arise from wise self-control, but from his parsimonious ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... solitary voice Should say "These verses polyglot Are not so bad," I should rejoice; But oh, my publishers would not! * * * * * And I, though shy and unanointed, Should ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... life and the solemn atmosphere of the deserted city. The noisy twittering of multitudes of ubiquitous sparrows, equally at home in Doric temples as amongst the sooty chimney stacks of London; the twinklings and rustlings of the lizards in the young leaves and grass; the polyglot babble of excursionists from Naples or La Cava that a warm day in Spring invariably attracts to Paestum:—these are not sounds that blend well with the solemn spirit of the place. We long to cross the intervening ages so as to throw ourselves, if only for one short hour, outside the cares and ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... was unimaginable. We stopped at a station at last where the Hindu clerk sold tea and biscuits. The train disgorged its passengers and there was a scramble in the tiny ticket office like the rush to get through turnstiles at a football game at home, only that the crowd was more polyglot and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Island in the Maldives as "the Light of Asia." Four hundred miles further and your good ship approaches Colombo. The great breakwater, whose first stone was laid by Albert Edward, is penetrated at last, and the polyglot and universal harbor of call unfolds ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... of such thalassic islands, moreover, involves a population so small that it is highly susceptible to the effects of intercrossing. Too restricted to absorb the constant influx of foreign elements, the inhabitants tend to become a highly mixed, polyglot breed. This they continue to be by the constant addition of foreign strains, so long as the islands remain foci of trade or strategic points for the control of the marine highways. Diomede Island in Bering Strait is the great market place of the polar tribes. Here ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... round her in a paroxysm of gratitude, regardless of her powder and chalk, which came off upon his coat and yellow beard in patches of white as he kissed her on both cheeks, calling her by every endearing name that occurred to his polyglot memory, from Sweetheart in English to Little Cabbage in French, till Cordova laughed and pushed him away, and made a tremendous ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... the bookcase. Frida's library offered him an amazing choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Bjoernsen and Ibsen, besides a great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and Norwegian. Here and there he came across some odd volumes of modern Greek. A whole shelf was devoted ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... stairs," said Lady Mabel, "has been amusing us at dinner with his version of our adventure at the ford of the Cayo; and a very good story he makes of it, giving some rich samples of Captain Hatton's polyglot eloquence. He, alone, seems not to have been in the dark; and saw all, and more than all, that occurred—nor does he forget you in the picture. But, papa cannot see the ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... hundred voices mingle with thy clamor; Bird, beast, and reptile take part in thy drama; Out-speak they all in turn without a stammer,— Brisk Polyglot! Voices of Killdeer, Plover, Duck, and Dotterel; Notes bubbling, hissing, mellow, sharp, and guttural; Of Cat-Bird, Cat, or Cart-Wheel, thou canst utter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... to make acquaintances among the polyglot population of the neighborhood. Their old hotel, the culinary aristocrat of the district, possessed a cafe in which, with true French hospitality, patrons were permitted to occupy tables indefinitely on the strength ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... universal thought. At its base are written some ancient titles of humanity which architecture had not registered. To the left of the entrance has been fixed the ancient bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot Bible rears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero and some other hybrid forms, the Vedas and ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... telling you. Isn't it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice's being so religious and so tremendously moral—so a cheval on fifty thousand riguardi. And then of course we mustn't forget," my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, "that some of Mark's ideas are—well, really—rather ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... glow of pink and purple and dripping diamonds, and on some of the trees was the delicate green of a second blossoming, like hope in the heart of age. They could scarcely refrain from betraying their exultation to the Hotel des Tourterelles, from which they had concealed their sufferings. But the polyglot population seething round its malodorous stairs and tortuous corridors remained ignorant that anything was passing in the life of these faded old creatures, and even on the day of drawing lots for the Wig the exuberant hotel retained its ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... unintelligible, being couched in a polyglot mixture of French and English, with a few words of Arabic thrown in, but by dint of patient inquiry Anstice presently made out the drift of his involved speech. Briefly, his plan was ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... The gentleman who had spoken was a recent arrival. She only knew him as Colonel Estcourt. He was a singularly interesting-looking man, home from India on sick leave, and the maidens, and wives, and widows, of this polyglot assemblage at the Hotel were all inclined to admiration of his physical perfections, and to dissatisfaction at a certain coldness and disdainfulness of themselves, which, to use their mildest form of ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... miscellaneous and polyglot audience inside the room, Helen soon became aware of nearly as many more spectators and listeners outside the building crowded about the open windows. The night was warm and still. The chapel had three windows on each side, and two at the rear behind ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... and pulse-beats, as others have a highly developed music sense, or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired. In Fanny Brandeis there was this abnormal response to the color and tone of any city. And Chicago was a huge, polyglot orchestra, made up of players in every possible sort of bizarre costume, performing on every known instrument, leaderless, terrifyingly discordant, yet with an occasional strain, exquisite and poignant, to be heard through ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... effects had left London by steamer direct for Cyprus, I therefore found them, upon my arrival from Egypt, in the charge of Mr. Z. Z. Williamson, a most active agent and perfect polyglot; the latter gift being an extreme advantage in this country of Babel-like confusion ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... admire. On one occasion—it was at the opera bouffe—this musical prodigy exhibited a playfulness and an exuberance of wit and humor that Aurora had never dreamed of. He ran the gamut of vocal conceit, and the polyglot fertility of his fancy simply astounded his rapt auditor. She was dazed, enchanted, spellbound. So here we find the fair Aurora passing from the condition of pity into the ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... light fantastic toe," for brogues and highlows stumped heavily on the floor; but what was wanting in elegance was amply compensated for by merriment and vivacity. The conversation was rather of a polyglot character, being carried on in French, Gaelic, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... the newcomers, and getting mixed in his "Yes, sir," "Ja, wohl," and "Si, signor." Amedee was an inexperienced tourist, who did not drag along with him a dozen trunks, and had not a rich and indolent air; so he was quickly despatched by the Swiss polyglot into a fourth-story room, which looked out into an open well, and was so gloomy that while he washed his hands he was afraid of falling ill and dying there without help. A notice written in four languages hung upon the ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... this man at the end of an intolerable hour. I bought two double-barreled echoes in good condition, and he threw in another, which he said was not salable because it only spoke German. He said, "She was a perfect polyglot once, but somehow her ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... very great. His fecundity was prodigious, and he wrote at will in seven languages. 'This polyglot facility was not in itself a very remarkable circumstance, for it grew out of his necessary education and geographical position. Few men in that age and region were limited to their mother tongue. The Prince of Orange, who made no special pretence to learning, possessed at least five ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... accompanying it. The earliest of these supplements, Interpretationes nominum Hebraicorum, an etymological index of Hebrew proper names, appeared first in the Bible of Sweynheym and Pannartz, Rome, 1471, and was reprinted without change in most of the editions previous to 1515. In the Complutensian Polyglot it underwent revision and the revised form appears in all the editions of Yolande Bonhomme, with due acknowledgment to Cardinal Ximenes. The Index rerum et sententiarum, however, announced in the title as a new addition to this edition (as it had been also announced in the edition of 1546, ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... put to sea with queer cargoes—cargoes that smelled sweet and spicy, with the spice of the far South Seas. Office sailor though he was, Blair Elliston commanded the respect of even the roughest of his polyglot crews—a respect not wholly uncommingled ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Pilgrim's Progress, and is proof of the same universality of interest, transcending the limits of language and of race. To no poem in the English language has the same kind of homage been paid so abundantly. Of what other poem is there a polyglot edition? Italy and England have competed with their polyglot editions of the Elegy: Torri's, bearing the title, 'Elegia di Tomaso Gray sopra un Cimitero di Campagna, tradotta dall' Inglese in piu lingue: Verona, 1817; Livorno, 1843;' and Van Voorst's London edition." ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... cooing of doves, the soft tones of the golden oriole, and the lively chatter of the red cardinal; by night the booming note of the bull-bat, the sonorous call of the trumpeter swan, and that lay far excelling all—the clear song of the polyglot thrush, the famed mocking-bird ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... she had allowed more than ever a free hand, on purpose to escort her to the Continent and encompass her there, and had dedicated to her, from the moment of their meeting, all the treasures of his experience. She had judged him in advance—polyglot and universal, very dear and very deep—as probably but a swindler finished to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying one well-kept Italian hand to his heart and plunging the other straight into ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... is superimposed with his old hankering for the oral and polyglot system of buncoing. That man had a vocabulary of about 10,000 words and synonyms, which arrayed themselves into contraband sophistries and parables when ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... a long time, and the longer they lasted the more heated became the disputes, culminating in shouts and personalities, and the less was it possible to arrive at any general conclusion from all that had been said. Prince Andrew, listening to this polyglot talk and to these surmises, plans, refutations, and shouts, felt nothing but amazement at what they were saying. A thought that had long since and often occurred to him during his military activities—the idea that there is not and cannot be any science of war, and that therefore ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... studies, and there is seldom one who cannot speak most of the Pomo dialects within a day's journey of his ancestral valley. The chiefs, especially, devote no little care to the training of their sons as polyglot diplomatists; and Robert White affirms that they frequently send them to reside several months with the chiefs of contiguous valleys to acquire the dialects ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... frontier station, much larger than could possibly be needed, but quite a good expression of the spirit of the new Finland. On the Russian side we came to the same grey old wooden station known to all passengers to and from Russia for polyglot profanity and passport difficulties. There were no porters, which was not surprising because there is barbed wire and an extremely hostile sort of neutrality along the frontier and traffic across has practically ceased. In the buffet, ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... him frequently at the Jockey Club in Paris, and there was his name on White's books for any one to read. A man of forty-five perhaps, clean-shaven, well set up, an inveterate globe-trotter, a prince among raconteurs, and the most astounding polyglot I have ever met. I myself have heard him talk Eskimo with one of Peary's natives, and he had collated some of his researches into Iranic-Turanian root-forms for the Philological Society. But let us go back ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... what the Jewish children learnt from their mothers—by taking special pains to translate into it the best thought of the world. This is a truly marvellous work. It has been done during the present generation, and Webster's Dictionary defines it as a polyglot jargon used for inter-communication by ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of tongues would have ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the velveteen-coated, wide-awaked loafers, the filthy tatterdemalions of all nations and their womenkind would have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by the unwilling ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the only work by which he is known to the musical world at large. He studied Goethe profoundly; and the notes which he has appended to the score show a most intimate knowledge of the Faust legend. His text is in one sense polyglot, as he has made use of portions of Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," as well as excerpts from Blaze de Bury, Lenau, Widmann, and others who have treated the legend. He studied Wagner's music also very closely, and to such purpose that after the first performance of this opera at La Scala, in 1868, ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... the house, followed by the polyglot curses of Barlasch, who was now endeavouring to find his ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... rosy face would be an obvious mocking imitation of the Herr Papa—if German children could ever, by any possibility, be irreverent? Or why does the Fraulein Marie, his sister, pink as Aurora, round as Hebe, suddenly veil her blue eyes with a golden lorgnette in the midst of our polyglot conversation? Is it to evade the direct, admiring glance of the impulsive American? Dare I say NO? Dare I say that that frank, clear, honest, earnest return of the eye, which has on the Continent most unfairly brought my fair countrywomen under criticism, is quite ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... at the chapel of the Bavarian Legation in London that he began contributing the Prout papers to Fraser's Magazine. These consisted of fanciful narratives, each serving as a vehicle for the display of his wonderful polyglot learning, and containing translations of well-known English songs into Latin, Greek, French, and Italian verse, which later he seriously represented as the true originals from which the English authors had boldly plagiarized. He also introduced into his stories ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Liberal Ascendancy: Tisza, Szapary, Wekerle, and Banffy.*—The primary policy of Tisza was to convert the polyglot Hungarian kingdom into a centralized and homogeneous Magyar state, and to this end he did not hesitate to employ the most relentless and sometimes unscrupulous means. Nominally a Liberal, he trampled the principles ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... show off her particular talent. One would play and one would sing (rather like the song in the children's book, "one could dance and one could sing, and one could play the violin"), and the third, the polyglot of the family, could speak several languages. We were rather puzzled as to what my eldest sister could do, as she was not very sociable and never spoke to strangers if she could help it, so we decided she must be very well dressed and preside at ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... most inaccessible part of such a briery tangle, that rollicking polyglot, the yellow-breasted chat, loves to hide its nest. Indeed, many birds can say with Br'er Rabbit that they were "bred en bawn in a brier-patch." Throughout the eastern half of the United $tates and Upper Canada the catbrier displays its insignificant little blossoms ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... so much as a "snifter." Once having found the way, and the means, the dago came again and yet again, neither giving nor having trouble until he ran foul of Munoz, the Mexican, whom he seemed to hate at sight. Whatever his lingo, or that employed by the polyglot Mexican, they understood each other, and the misunderstanding that followed ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... deliberation. Italian was clearly out of the question, and French she doubtless knew better than he—he deplored this polyglot education ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... philology, but every human being is a divinely appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems to me to prove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians; it was an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts of people of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel: suppose some great prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa. The prophet himself might be a simple or unlettered man. But no one who ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... fate was not so tragic, was the learned Arias Montanus, a Spaniard, who produced at the command of King Philip II. the famous Polyglot Bible printed at Antwerp in nine tomes. He possessed a wonderful knowledge of several languages, and devoted immense labour to his great work. But in spite of the royal approval of his work his book met with much opposition on the part of the extreme Roman ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... When my old friend William Woodall, M.P. for Stoke (Governor-General of the Ordnance in Mr. Gladstone's Government 1885), gave at St. Anne's Mansions his famous "Sandwich Soirees" to his friends, the spacious ballroom on the ground floor packed with his many friends—a characteristic, polyglot gathering of Ministers and Parliamentarians of all kinds, musicians, dramatists, authors, artists, actors, and journalists, who sang, recited, and gave a gratuitous entertainment (for some of these I acted as his hon. secretary, and helped to get together ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Francisco that makes it difficult to single out any one type. French and Italian restaurants appear to predominate, but the number of other places, including Spanish, Greek, Mexican, Hungarian and Slavonic—not to mention Chinese—makes the array a long and polyglot one. In the vicinity of Broadway, Kearny and Columbus avenue, streets that penetrate the heart of the Latin Quarter, and along upper Montgomery street, there are sufficient individual cafes to keep any explorer after atmospheric ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... repeated, the word Huatinmio, began to enter largely into their conversation, and piqued the curiosity of the historiographer. Marcoy begged the interpreter to procure him the explanation of this perpetual shibboleth. Half by signs, half in the polyglot jargon which he had been employing with the Siriniris, Garcia managed to understand that the word in question was the name of their village, situated at a small distance and in a direction which they indicated. In this retreat, they said, no inhabitants remained but women, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... Hebrew drinking-song, which he had learned from some Jews with whom he had once travelled and astonished by joining in their conversation." {23} Borrow's colloquial gift was, to all appearance, closely allied to that of this polyglot Fleming. ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... foreign market and snobbishness were undreamed-of degradations. Paris had not yet been turned into the Foire du Monde that she has since become, with whole quarters given over to the use of foreigners,—theatres, restaurants, and hotels created only for the use of a polyglot population that could give lessons to the people ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... over and his comrades realized that he was a polyglot. Then in a joyous spirit of over-confidence, he waved the oriflamme ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... the men in the body of the carriage broke into a boyish cheer of delight, which drowned for all his passengers but Amaryllis the words of that stream of polyglot invective, exhortation and endearment which the driver poured out over his cattle; a lost jeremiad, for Dick says he does not remember, and Amaryllis that, though she heard it all, there was much that she did not understand and a great deal ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... had been bred a certain contempt for his own people—a contempt which he had made it a custom to conceal, but which now burst forth in a polyglot whirlwind of curses upon the heads of Kah-Chucte and Gowhee. They cringed before him like a brace of snarling wolf dogs, too cowardly to spring, too wolfish to cover their fangs. They were not handsome creatures. Neither was Sitka Charley. All three ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... from this situation, and from her past history, that Germany has the sound good sense not to be influenced by the latest school of sentimentalists, who pretend to believe that the world is a polyglot Sunday-school, with converted millionaires as teachers therein; or, if not that, a counting-house, where all questions of honor, race, religion, love, pride, all the questions which bubble their answers in our blood, are to be settled by weighing their comparative cost in dollars. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... appearance of the sailor airmen was at a proposed review of the fleet by the King at a test mobilization. The King was unable to attend, but the naval pilots carried out their part of the programme very creditably considering the polyglot nature of their sea-planes. A few weeks later and the country ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... presumed to know any thing of Russian literature, or even to have enquired whether it contains any thing worth knowing? Are there a dozen literary men or women amongst us who could read a Russian romance, or understand a Russian drama? Dr Bowring was regarded as a prodigy of polyglot learning, because he gave us some very imperfect versions of Russian ballads; and we were thankful even for that contribution, from which, we doubt not, many worthy and well-informed people learned for the first time that Russia produced poets as well as potashes. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... to have known, for he was a perfect polyglot dictionary in himself. He did not pretend, like a certain learned pundit, to speak the two thousand languages and four thousand idioms made use of in different parts of the globe, but he did know all the ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... two letters were brought to him. The superscription of one was scrawled in a boyish hand. The other was scented, dainty, of pale lavender, and bore a familiar handwriting and a familiar coronet. In amazement he opened this first. It was from the Princess Galitzin, written in the polyglot of French, English ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... by a reference to a particular spear. Since it consoles and comforts the solitary walks of an aged man, steeped to the lips in the superstitions of his race, and haply ignorant of, or indifferent to, the polyglot pastimes of the younger generation soiled by contact with the whites, the spear, though not a weapon of offence or of sport, is serious and indeed vital to the peace of mind of its owner. He is one of the few ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... formed cultural improvement classes for such as Leon Coventry, the printer, who knows half the literatures of the world, and MacLachan, the tailor, to whom Carlyle is by way of being light reading. She delivered some edifying exhortations upon the subject of Americanism to Polyglot Elsa, of the Elite Restaurant (who had taken upon her sturdy young shoulders the support of an old mother and a paralytic sister, so that her two brothers might enlist for the war—a detail of patriotism which the dispenser of platitudes might have learned ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... duel with all the forms—an improvement at any rate upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against bullets, the natural reflection in dark ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... wandered, fur-coated, into the City, the patterer has lost his occupation. Robbery and murder have degenerated into Chinese puzzles, whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the idle brain. The misunderstanding of Poe has produced a vast polyglot literature, for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of Captain Smith. Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited, and it is a false reflection of M. Dupin, which dazzles the eye of ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... a-praying as they went in more tongues than were babbled at Babel Tower; in other words, on the day when the never-to-be-broken Hindenburg line was broken through and through, a battalion of one of the infantry regiments of this same polyglot division formed a little individual ground swell in the ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... Sailor's Word Book has no alternative title. But Dana's Seaman's Friend is known in England under the name of The Seaman's Manual. Technicalities change so much more slowly afloat than ashore that even the ultra-modern editions of Paasch's magnificent polyglot dictionary, From Keel to Truck, still contain many nautical terms which will help the reader out ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... quartos and octavos, and that only the present period has been characterized by twelvemos and sixteenmos. We think of the Gutenberg Bible, the Nuremberg Chronicle, the mighty editions of the Fathers, the polyglot Bibles of Paris, London, and Antwerp,—fairly to be called limp teachers' Bibles,—the 1611 Bible, the Shakespeare folios; then of the quarto editions of Addison, Pope, Walpole, and their contemporaries, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... with some Spanish terms and hoped to get a reply, and keep up a kind of running conversation that might mislead a friend who was with me, into the belief that I was as familiar with the Indian tongue as with my own. I began conversing with him in my polyglot manner. I did not get a reply. I conversed with him some more in a desultory way, for I had heard that he was a great orator in his tribe, and I wanted to get his views on national affairs. Still he was silent. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... relate another amusing incident. Unable to get at my towels packed in my registered baggage, and ignorant of the Russian language, I inquired of a polyglot fellow-passenger what was the Russian word for towel, so that I could ask ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... at Second Avenue, were delivered without comment, even though the IPO still firmly held that they were technically misaddressed. And, privately, even the IPO officials admitted that the numbers were easier to say and remember than the polyglot street names that had been tagged on by ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... rivalled, if not eclipsed, by those of Alcala; [30] which combined higher advantages for ecclesiastical with civil education, and which, under the splendid patronage of Cardinal Ximenes, executed the famous polyglot version of the Scriptures, the most stupendous literary enterprise of ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... progress—the spread of liberal sentiments over the Continent; on their mental tablets, the names of Russia, Austria, and the Pope, are inscribed in red ink. I have heard some of them talk vigorous sense—yea, I have been present at polyglot discussions in the old, oak-lined dining-room at Hunsden Wood, where a singular insight was given of the sentiments entertained by resolute minds respecting old northern despotisms, and old southern superstitions: also, I have heard much twaddle, enounced chiefly in French and Deutsch, but let ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... from Monaco to seek, was now already at Aix la Chapelle, on his way to America, on a long leave. He had wearily made a tour of the principal hotels and scanned the registers with no lucky find! Not a single gleam of hope shone out in all the polyglot inscriptions passing under his eye! And so he had sadly betaken himself to a safe, retired place, where he could hold the aforesaid ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... to look after reform bills. It aided in preventing the repeal of the prohibitory law in Indian Territory, the resubmission of the prohibitory constitution of Maine, and in preserving the prohibitory law of Vermont. It has secured 20,000,000 signatures and attestations, including 7,000,000 on the Polyglot Petition to the governments of the world. Thousands of girls have been rescued from lives of shame and tens of thousands of men have signed the total abstinence pledge and been redeemed from inebriety through ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the Red River hard by where the City of Winnipeg with its aggressive business marts and its surging polyglot population now stands, there is the old Kildonan Church, which the original Selkirk Settlers, pioneers of the West, built for themselves and their children. These early colonists, unmindful of worldly gain, had the traditional hospitality of the Highland race to which they belonged, and the proverbial ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... the augurs of Red Dog, French Pete, a polyglot jester, "that while every fool went to taking up claims where the gold had already been found no one thought of stepping into the old man's old choux in the cabbage-garden!" Any doubt, however, of the alliance of ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... gravitates into danger with inevitable certainty, and stumbles through all manner of difficulties and bothers by reason of a serene good-humour that nothing can ruffle and a cool resolution before which every obstacle fades away. Was there ever a more compositely polyglot cosmopolitan than poor young de Liefde—half Dutchman, half German by birth, an Englishman by adoption, a Frenchman in temperament, speaking with equal fluency the language of all four countries, and an unconsidered trifle of some half-dozen European languages ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... Drawn by the coquettish senoritas, the music of the weird Spanish minstrels, and the strange piquant Mexican dishes served at a hundred competing tables, crowds thronged the Alamo Plaza all night. Travellers, rancheros, family parties, gay gasconading rounders, sightseers and prowlers of polyglot, owlish San Antone mingled there at the centre of the city's fun and frolic. The popping of corks, pistols, and questions; the glitter of eyes, jewels and daggers; the ring of laughter and coin—these were the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... from her polyglot accomplishments may be called a many-sided woman, has been, both by Nature and education, most liberally endowed with intellectual gifts. The depressing influence of continual invalidism alone prevents her from taking that literary position which good health and application would soon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... of cities and to form stable governments. The kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred were "new," compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they were also in every way different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing in common with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the Caesars of Byzantium; their social problems and after-time history were totally different. This is not true of those "new" nations which spring direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, the United States, are all "new" nations, compared with the nations ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... unprogressive polyglot settlement, and the place assumed a still more primeval character when the Indian Reservation was formed near by. When French Canadian settlers arrived, however, the place became less discordant to the life ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is true that a great portion of the human race, especially in the big polyglot empires and the smaller states of Europe, are groaning under the incubus of the language difficulty, and have to spend years on the study of mere words before they can fit themselves for an active career, then the abolition of this ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... The traffic on deck nearly deserved the name of din. Commands and calls were being bawled in English, French, and polyglot profanity. A donkey-engine was rumbling, a winch clattering, a capstan-pawl clanking. Alongside a tug was panting hoarsely. The engine room telegraph jangled furiously, the fabric of the ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... the music has ceased or softened down and is taken up afresh by the Martyr Chorus.[18] Again John's figures give out. He declares that nobody could count the multitudes that make up this chorus. It is a polyglot chorus. They sing in many different languages, but all blend into full rhythm. It's a scarred chorus, too. These have been through great tribulation. Their scars tell the mute story of the fierceness of the fight, and ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... the middle of the century (1657) came in England a champion of the sacred theory more important than any of these—Brian Walton, Bishop of Chester. His Polyglot Bible dominated English scriptural criticism throughout the remainder of the century. He prefaces his great work by proving at length the divine origin of Hebrew, and the derivation from it of all other forms of speech. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White |
