"Vowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enclosed in pluses represent boldface; Vowels followed by a colon represent a long vowel (printed with a ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... have been formed and ripened by familiarity with the harmonies of the Italian language. In his Tractate on Education addressed to Mr. Hartlib, he recommends that boys should be instructed in the Italian pronunciation of vowel sounds, in order to give sonorousness and dignity to elocution. This slight indication supplies us with a key to the method of melodious structure employed by Milton in his blank verse. Those who have carefully studied the harmonies ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... her sweet voice, the golden process prove; Gaze, as they learn; and, as they listen, love. The first from Alpha to Omega joins The letter'd tribes along the level lines; 125 Weighs with nice ear the vowel, liquid, surd, And breaks in syllables the volant word. Then forms the next upon the marshal'd plain In deepening ranks his dexterous cypher-train; And counts, as wheel the decimating bands, 130 The dews of AEgypt, or Arabia's sands, And then the ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... the ascent of Mount Tongariro, which is tapu, or sacred. They are now much better treated than formerly, and send four members to Parliament. In their language there is no s or f, vowels are very numerous, and every word ends with a vowel. The sound of the words, therefore, is easy and flowing, and the native names are far more euphonious than ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... in the first place, that we inserted the vowel which amuses him so much, not from ignorance or from carelessness, but advisedly, and in conformity with the practice of several respectable writers. He will find the word hecatare in Ree's Cyclopaedia. He will find ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 'copies' and are therefore full of errors, which are due for the most part, doubtless, to the copyist and not to the sculptor. It is not difficult, however, in most cases under consideration here, to restore the correct reading. Usually only vowel signs are omitted or misread and, here, and there, consonants closely resembling one another as va and cha, va, and dha, ga and ['s]a, la and ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... words that are not emphatic, but usually the metrical accent of any given word corresponds to its logical accent. The accentuation of a syllable tends to lengthen the time used in the pronunciation of that syllable, and so we call it long, although the sound of its vowel may be short. Short syllables are those which are unaccented, even though the vowel has the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... to each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt, and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel in connection with r ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... "Maniyat" death. Mr. R. S. Poole (the Academy, April 26, 1879) reproaches Mr. Payne for confounding "Muniyat" (desire) with "Maniyat" (death) but both are written the same except when vowel-points are used. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... be represented in the latin-1 character set are shown as: [oe] oe ligature [e,] "e caudata": equivalent to ae or ae [u] [e] vowel with circumflex (also a and o) following m ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... of praying these things was equally complex and uncouth, equally the bond-slave of tradition; here a rising and there a bow, now three steps backwards and now a beating of the breast, this bit for the congregation and that for the minister, variants of a page, a word, a syllable, even a vowel, ready for every possible contingency. Their religious consciousness was largely a musical box—the thrill of the ram's horn, the cadenza of psalmic phrase, the jubilance of a festival "Amen" and the sobriety of a work-a-day "Amen," ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... raised again and again in song. There was, however, something so curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly funny, in "The Old Oaken Bucket," from lips that have difficulty with the vowel sounds of English; from children that never saw a well and never will see one;—and I was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling about "I love thy templed hills," etc., in that patriotic Plymouth Rock song which is so little adapted for universal American use that, in a gibe not without ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... thousands,) from "Euphues his England," ed. 1597, which happened to lie on our table when we read Mr. Hamilton's first letter. "For that Honnie taken excessiuelie, cloyeth the stomacke though it be Honny." (Sig. Aa3.) In this instance, "honey," spelled first in the old way, as to the last vowel sound, on its repetition, in the same sentence, is spelled in what is called the new way; but in the example which follows, the word "folly," which appears first as a catchword at the bottom of the page in modern spelling, is found in the ancient ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Army in Flanders, With his finest of armies and proudest of navies, To wreak his old grudge against Jefferson Davis. Then "forward the column," he said to McDowell; And the Zouaves, with a shout, Most fiercely cried out, "To Richmond or h—ll" (I omit here the vowel), And Winfield, he ordered his carriage and four, A dashing turn-out, to be brought to the door, For a pleasant excursion to Richmond. Major-General Scott Had there on the spot A splendid array To plunder and slay; In the camp he might boast Such a numerous ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... themselves and are questioned by the leader of the game and must answer without bringing in a word containing a forbidden vowel. Say the vowel "a" is forbidden, the leader asks—"Are you fond of playing the piano?" The answer "Yes, very much," would be correct as the words do not contain the letter "a." But if the answer were—"Yes, and I am fond of singing too," the speaker would have to pay a forfeit. ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... produced be right or wrong, the influence of the resonance cavities is about the same. It is therefore idle to pay any attention to the subject of air resonance. Only one form of resonance is of any value in tone-production (considered as distinct from vowel formation). This is the sounding-board resonance of the bones of the head and chest. To secure this, the most important reinforcement of the tone, the larynx must be firmly held in a fixed position against the backbone, at the fifth cervical vertebra. All theories as to the registers ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... number of experiments, seeking to discover the correct mechanism of English and foreign elements of speech, and I remember especially an investigation in which we were engaged concerning the musical relations of vowel sounds. When vocal sounds are whispered, each vowel seems to possess a particular pitch of its own, and by whispering certain vowels in succession a musical scale can be distinctly perceived. Our aim was to determine the natural pitch of each vowel; ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... the vowels as having had their "pure sound" in the Elizabethan age. We are not sure if we understand him rightly; but have they lost it? We English have the same vowel-sounds with other nations, but indicate them by different signs. Slight changes in orthoepy we cannot account for, except by pleading the general issue of custom. Why should foot and boot be sounded differently? Why food and good? Why should the Yankee mark the distinction between the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... not think the fault was all on one side, Miss Hethencourt," summed up the Captain, speaking in guttural consonant and flattened vowel from suppressed emotion. "The—er—the plaintiff must have approached the dog ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... has. Seems t'ave come back mos' 'no—mos' 'nopportune 'casion. All right, ole man: jus' give me y' arm and I get 'long mos' com-for-ble, mos' comfort-a-ble," he ended with a leer of triumph at having achieved the vowel. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... words or phrases are capitalized. A few obvious errors have been corrected. Many German names with umlauts have had the umlaut replaced with an 'e' following the vowel (according to standard form) due to the limitations of ASCII. These names are noted ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... as their carriages arrived, by an official, who knew the names and addresses of us all. We also knew his mode of adapting the names of foreigners to his Italian organs. "Hasa" (Florentine for casa) "Tro-lo-pe," with a long-drawn-out accent on the last vowel, was the absolutely fatal signal for the sudden breaking up of many a ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... such a comfortable home. For, the maternal and paternal Slowboy were alike unknown to Fame, and Tilly had been bred by public charity, a foundling; which word, though only differing from fondling by one vowel's length, is very different in meaning, and expresses ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... Hartmann's theory of the collective suicide of mankind, and in throwing a "bloody spittle of contempt" at life. A "bloody spittle," as is known from Arthur Rimbaud's sonnets on consonants, stands before the eyes of everyone who pronounces the vowel i, just as the vowel a brings up the picture of "black, shaggy flies, which buzz around ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... sir, not Grime," said Nigel, something shortly, and laying an emphasis on the vowel—for few Scotsmen understand raillery upon the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... a means of entertaining himself, and of dividing the long day into stages of interest, without neglecting business. This ingenious invention, remarkable, like many great discoveries, for its simplicity, consisted in varying the first vowel in the word "paper," and substituting, in its stead, at different periods of the day, all the other vowels in grammatical succession. Thus, before daylight in the winter-time, he went to and fro, in his little oilskin cap and cape, and his big comforter, piercing ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... final vowel i would, on the basis of the explanation offered, be paralleled by the i of Igigi—an indication of the plural. See Delitzsch, Assyr. Gram. Sec. ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... that they only partially connect themselves with Chaucer's use of forms which are now obsolete—more especially of inflexions of verbs and substantives (including several instances of the famous final e), and contractions with the negative ne and other monosyllabic words ending in a vowel, of the initial syllables of words beginning with vowels or with the letter h. These and other variations from later usage in spelling and pronunciation—such as the occurrence of an e (sometimes ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... confidant, who appears often in the Spanish drama. The Spanish playwright did not confine himself to one form of verse; and Mr. MacCarthy, in his adequate translation, has followed the various forms of Calderon, only not attempting the assonant vowel, so hard to escape in Spanish, and still harder to reproduce in English. These selections give no impression of the amazing invention of Calderon. This can only be appreciated through reading 'The Constant Prince,' 'The Physician ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... his tent, where, by the light of a large fire made of brushwood and cow's dung, they are taught a few sentences from the Koran, and are initiated into the principles of their creed. Their alphabet differs but little from that in Richardson's Arabic Grammar. They always write with the vowel points. Their priests even affect to know something of foreign literature. The priest of Benowm assured me that he could read the writings of the Christians: he showed me a number of barbarous ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... recent editions of Cocceius. To the Voetians this conduct was not much better than atheism. They hurled all the curses and plagues of the Bible against every one who whispered that there could be a mistake in the transcription of a word or even of a Hebrew vowel-point. The Cocceian brought all his questions into the pulpit, where he preached them in a manner more adapted to addle the heads of his hearers than to edify their hearts. Hebrew grammars were published for the laity. Even women,—among ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... important details for future reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter. If you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friend at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A, for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R, thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis, you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward, that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of a holly grove in the central spot of the Forest in the Druid time, would account for these trees being now so much more numerous round the Speech House than they are in any other part of the woods. The Saxon name is merely the word holy with the vowel shortened, as in holiday; and that the tree really was regarded as holy is shown by the custom in the Forest Mine Court of taking the oath on a stick of holly held in the hand. This custom survived down to our own times; for Kedgwin H. Fryer, the late Town ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... were, for the most part, extremely rude in their versification. Their stanzas of four or two lines have not the full rhyme of vowel and consonant, but merely what the Spaniards call the "assonante," or vowel rhyme, and attention seldom seems to have been paid to the number of feet on which the lines moved along. But, however defective their poetry may be in point of harmony of numbers, it describes, in vivid and barbaric ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... they were broken into stanzas of four lines each, thence called redondillas, or roundelays, but their prominent peculiarity is that of the asonante, an imperfect rhyme that echoes the same vowel, but not the same final consonant in the terminating syllables. This metrical form was at a later period adopted by the dramatists, and is now used in ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... School. She notices with what pleasure her father, perhaps a somewhat exceptional parent, receives and answers letters. She desires to write and her mother makes her say her own name carefully, noticing first the "open" or vowel sounds and then by noting the position of her tongue she finds the closed sounds. As she hears the sound she is shown how to make it. Her father leaves home at the right moment, Lina writes to him, receives and is able to read his answer, printed like her own in Roman capitals. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... we, was our firm declaration; we were most pacifically inclined, and ever had been; we were, in fact, little saints. But the enemy could not be brought to any terms of accommodation. "That we will try," said the vowel amongst our guardians, Mr. E. He, being a magistrate, had naturally some weight with the proprietors of the cotton factory. The foremen of the several floors were summoned, and gave it as their humble opinion that we, the aristocratic party in the war, were as bad as the sans culottes—"not ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... a famous sneeze by delegating to each of a group some vowel in the word "h—sh!" It shall be "hash" for this one, "hish" for that one, "hush" for still another, and so on. Then the professor counts three, at which all yell together, and the consolidated sound is ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... Spinoza's own times the work met with unbounded indignation. Indeed hardly any age could have been less prepared for its reception. So rigorous a theory of verbal inspiration was then held, that the question of the date of the introduction of the Hebrew vowel points was discussed under the idea that inspiration would be overthrown, if the admission was made that they were introduced after the time of the closing of the canon.(355) The tone of fairness in ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon visions ranging between the extremes of man's experience. Spelled with an "e" it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams; with an "a" it drapes ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... doubt that the Arabic name, Usdum, is identical with Sodom, by a well-known custom of the language to invert the consonant and vowel of the first syllable. But even this is brought back to the original state in the adjective form. Thus I heard our guides speak of the Jebel Sid'mi, meaning the Khash'm or Jebel Usdum, or ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... slim walking-stick as if he had been wielding sword and buckler in an opera, and his narrow chest swelled under the tight buttons of his ragged old frock-coat. Every English word he spoke was supplemented by an Italian vowel, so that his language, though it was perfectly fluent and correct, sounded quite foreign. His extraordinary height and leanness made him grotesque to look at, but neither the comicality of his figure nor his theatrical voice and gesture could kill the fact that he was in earnest, ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... he will find a large excursus on this subject. The word, he avers, is Phoenician: from maphula, one of those kinds of bread named as such by Athenaeus. "It was a cake," says Athenaeus, "baked on a hearth or griddle." He derives this by taking away the final vowel, and then changing l for n; thus: ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... prefixes ending in a vowel (except bi and tri) when using them before a vowel: co-exist. When using such a prefix before a consonant do not use the hyphen except to distinguish the word from a word of the same letters but of different meaning: correspondent, but co-respondent (one ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... lines in English poetry will hardly be wondered at, however it may be open to such criticisms as Pope's and Churchill's, when it is noted that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by the vowel a alone, considerably more than 500; by the vowel e, about 450; by the vowel i, nearly 400; by the vowel o, rather more than 400; and by the vowel u, upwards of 260; a calculation entirely exclusive of the large number of monosyllables formed ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... Analysis of a pair of rhyming syllables.—Let the syllables told and bold be taken to pieces, and let the separate parts of each be compared. Viewed in reference to metre, they consist of three parts or elements: 1. the vowel (o); 2. the part preceding the vowel (t and b respectively); 3. the parts following the vowel (ld). Now the vowel (o) and the parts following the vowel (ld) are alike in both words (old); but the part preceding the vowel is different in the different ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... these three symbols, the V, is a repetition of one of those we have already shown to be s, t, f, or n. Of the remaining two, [-] <, one must be a vowel, that is, it must be either u, e, o, u, or y; i being already determined upon. Now how many [-]'s and <'s do we find in the collection before us? Ten or more of the first, and six, or about six, of the latter. Recalling the table made out by Poe—a table I once ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... need, in the larger development, to be rounded. The vowel forms "oo" as in moon, "o" as in roll, and "a" as in saw, greatly help in giving a rounded form to the general speech; for all vowels can be molded somewhat into the form of these rounder ones. The vowels "e" as in meet, "a" as in late, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... onward in his impetuous career. The sun glanced between the trees as they passed the cottage door. Then came the Magistrate's Clerk, faultlessly attired, with florid face and glittering eyeglass, who, in an ambitious youth, finding his name too suggestive of plebeian blood, changed a vowel in it, and thereby gave an aristocratic flavour to the title of his partnership, and who acquired, with this new dignity, the taste for a monocle, a horse, and a good cigar. Following were the members of the medley—the big butcher on his sturdy pony, the "dealer" on his black, raw-boned ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... word is either a secondary entry or a parenthesized alternative spelling in the form "ms ()". headword spelled "ms" Minor difference, generally an added or omitted macron or a predictable vowel variation such as for . form of "ms" The referenced word is an inflected form. A few very common patterns such as adverbs in "-lce" listed under adjectives in "-lic" are not individually noted. redirected to "ms" ...
— A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - For the Use of Students • John R. Clark Hall
... against the back of the pharynx. If the mouth is to be shut off the soft palate is lowered, and rests closely upon the back of the tongue. This partition plays a most important part in vocalization. In the formation of all pure vowel sounds it is raised, thereby closing the nasal cavities, and it has been found that the closure is loosest for "ah" (as in "father") and tightest for "e" (as in "bee"), the intermediate vowels being "a" (as in "name"), ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... back than A. D. 580. Its translators had before them much older and more perfect MSS. than any that survived to the time of the masoretic recension, when an attempt was made to give uniformity to the readings and renderings of the Hebrew text by means of the vowel points, diacritical signs, terminal letters, etc., all of which are now subject to rejection by ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... SECURED. Instead of NAMELY, I would always use WHICH IS, or THAT IS, that my-election is secured. The other word is, MINE OWN INCLINATIONS: this is certainly correct before a subsequent word that begins with a vowel; but it is too correct, and is now disused as too formal, notwithstanding the hiatus occasioned by MY OWN. Every language has its peculiarities; they are established by usage, and whether right or wrong, they must be complied with. I could instance many very absurd ones in different ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... PROF. PHIL. And the vowel i by bringing the jaws still closer to one another, and stretching the two corners of the mouth towards ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... seen his view of the moral significance of poetry. He desired, however, to formulate for himself and for students certain metrical laws. What differentiates poetry from prose? How does a writer produce certain effects with certain rhythms and vowel and consonant arrangements? The student wishes to know why the forms are fair and hear how the tale is told. By the study of rhythm, tune, and color, Lanier believed that one might receive "a whole new world of possible delight." He believed with Sylvester ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... synagogue at K'ai-feng Fu, in Central China, but it is not absolutely certain when they first reached the country. Some say, immediately after the Captivity; others put it much later. In 1850 several Hebrew rolls of parts of the Pentateuch, in the square character, with vowel-points, were obtained from the above city. There were then no professing Jews to be found, but in recent years a movement has been set on foot to ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... adult men, as Haller long ago remarked,[6] the sound partakes of the character of the vowels (as pronounced in German) O and A; whilst with children and women, it has more of the character of E and I; and these latter vowel-sounds naturally have, as Helmholtz has shown, a higher pitch than the former; yet both tones of laughter equally express enjoyment ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... for me to explain," said the frivolous voice; "but the final vowel of the first word dissatisfied him and he substituted another. The capabilities of errand-boys with pencil or chalk should never be lost sight of when one is choosing a name for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... behold the enigma!" Then, beginning with the eldest, the twelve jabbered at us in turn, apparently in different tongues, some sibilant, some guttural, and others with the musical cadence of frequent vowel sounds. Needless to say, each was equally incomprehensible to us, and we did not think it worth while to try German or English upon them. When they had finished, they looked much vexed, and slowly wagged their beards. Then the youth spoke something to them with a confident ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... seating herself and letting her fingers run over the keys, "can't you substitute another word for 'muffled' in the third line? It comes on a high note—upper g—and I want a long, not a short vowel sound." ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... is the natural an' conjayneal ripriseentitive of the ancient Oioneean. It's vowel-sounds, its diphthongs, its shuperabundince of leginds, all show this most pleenly. So, too, if we apploy this modern Oineean to a thransleetion of Homer, we see it has schtoopindous advantages. The Homeric neems, the ipithets, and the woild alterneetion of dacthyls an' spondees, may all ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... etc. And above rhymes in Chaucer to remove. Suspecting that the broader sounds are the older, we may surmise that remove and food have retained their old sounds, and that cook, once coke, would have rhymed to our Luke, the vowel being brought a little nearer, perhaps, to the o in our present coke, the fuel, probably so called as used by cooks. If this be so, the Chief Justice Cook[614] of our lawyers, and the Coke (pronounced like the fuel) ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... ... [vowel with macron or "long" mark] [)a] [)e] [)i] ... [vowel with breve or "short" mark] [The book generally used circumflex accents to represent long vowels. Anomalies are ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... used before consonantal sounds and an which is used before vowel sounds are called indefinite articles because they individualize without specializing. The is called the definite article because it both ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... Thirdly, the French, who are equally chargeable with the English with barbarism in this particular, dispose of their le and their la without ceremony, and always take care that they shall be absorbed, both in verse and in prose, in the vowel that immediately follows them. Fourthly, and I believe lastly, the practice of cutting short "the" is warranted by Milton, who of all English poets that ever lived, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... designed as an artificial language to remember numbers, as of the eras, or dates of history. This was done by substituting one consonant and one vowel for each figure of the ten cyphers used in arithmetic, and by composing words of these letters; which words Mr. Grey makes into hexameter verses, and produces an audible jargon, which is to be committed to memory, and occasionally analysed into numbers when ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... enervates the last Line. But 'twould be still better enervated if Mr. Philips had used only such Words as have very few Consonants in them. For by Consonants, joyn'd with the Vowel O, a Writer may render his Language, in Epick Poetry, just as Sonorous as he will; and by the want of Consonants and by delighting in the other soft Vowels he may render it weak. I cannot see that Mr. PHILIPS has any Line where the Language is wholly enervated. But see how Spencer has done this. ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... Filipino riddles, in whatever language, are likely to be in poetical form. The commonest type is in two well-balanced, rhyming lines. Filipino versification is less exacting in its demand in rhyme than our own; it is sufficient if the final syllables contain the same vowel; thus Rizal says—ayup and pagud, aval and alam, rhyme. The commonest riddle verse contains five or seven, or six, ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... name of the symbol which we can reach is the Hebrew beth, to which the Phoenician must have been closely akin, as is shown by the Greek [Greek: beta], which is borrowed from it with a vowel affixed. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Hebrew language is aware that we have in the conjugation of our verbs a mode known as the 'intensive voice,' which, by means of an almost imperceptible modification of vowel-points, intensifies the meaning of the primitive root. A similar significance seems to attach to the Jews themselves in connection with the people among whom they dwell. They are the 'intensive form' of any ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... convey of the peculiarities of different minds, I will simply remark—First, that the persistence of the colour association with sounds is fully as remarkable as that of the Number-Form with numbers. Secondly, that the vowel sounds chiefly evoke them. Thirdly, that the seers are invariably most minute in their description of the precise tint and hue of the colour. They are never satisfied, for instance, with saying "blue," but will take a great deal ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... a man's quality in respect to his affection and love is known to the angels. Also in the speech of celestial angels there are no hard consonants, and it rarely passes from one consonant to another without the interposition of a word beginning with a vowel. This is why in the Word the particle "and" is so often interposed, as can be seen by those who read the Word in the Hebrew, in which this particle is soft, beginning and ending with a vowel sound. Again, in the Word, in Hebrew, ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... voice, should also be adapted to develop and perfect the process of breathing. The student should be frequently trained in set exercises in loud exclamations, pronouncing with great force the separate vowel sounds, single words, and whole sentences, and at the same time taking care to bring into vigorous action, all the muscular apparatus of respiration. Shouting, calling, and loud vociferation, in the open air, both while ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... accompanied by a cedilla. In juxtaposition with the E, (TSE,) which is pronounced with great softness, sometimes C, (TSIE,) the accented S is almost warbled. The Z has three sounds: the Z, (JAIS,) the Z, (ZED,) and the Z, (ZIED). The Y forms a vowel of a muffled tone, which, as the L, cannot be represented by any equivalent sound in French, and which like it gives a variety of ineffable shades to the language. These fine and light elements enable the Polish women to assume a lingering and singing ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... this Head of the Language, consider Milton's Numbers, in which he has made use of several Elisions, which are not customary among other English Poets, as may be particularly observed in his cutting off the Letter Y, when it precedes a Vowel. [10] This, and some other Innovation in the Measure of his Verse, has varied his Numbers in such a manner, as makes them incapable of satiating the Ear, and cloying the Reader, which the same uniform Measure would certainly have ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... work to do, and soon went; and very nearly up to Hall time Williams was engaged in a vain attempt to identify the subject of his picture. 'If the vowel before the ng had only been left, it would have been easy enough,' he thought; 'but as it is, the name may be anything from Guestingley to Langley, and there are many more names ending like this than I thought; and this rotten book ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... not know. My work seemed to revolve about K-h. I felt greatly encouraged with Khayyam,—pronounced Ki-yam,—which had the K sound, and in form had the h. But was there nothing more in Knight? Nothing except the ultimate t and the long vowel, and the vowel I had also in Ki-yam; the lines converged every way toward Ki, or toward K-h-a-y, ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... 'lawn'; 'suite' and 'suit'; 'swinge' and 'swing'; 'gulph' and 'gulp'; 'launch' and 'lance'; 'wealth' and 'weal'; 'stripe' and 'strip'; 'borne' and 'born'; 'clothes' and 'cloths';—or a slight internal vowel change finds place, as between 'dent' and 'dint'; 'rant' and 'rent' (a ranting actor tears or rends a passion to tatters){107}; 'creak' and 'croak'; 'float' and 'fleet'; 'sleek' and 'slick'; 'sheen' and 'shine'; 'shriek' ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... the syllabary. Let us take for consideration the consonantal sound represented by the letter b. A moment's consideration will make it clear that this sound enters into a large number of syllables. There are, for example, at least twenty vowel sounds in the English language, not to speak of certain digraphs; that is to say, each of the important vowels has from two to six sounds. Each of these vowel sounds may enter into combination with the b sound alone to form three syllables; as ba, ab, bal, be, eb, bel, etc. Thus there ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Roman Catholic Church. What might be described as operatic tendencies in the music of worship date further back than the foundation of Christianity. The Egyptians were accustomed to sing "jubilations" to their gods, and these consisted of florid cadences on prolonged vowel sounds. The Greeks caroled on vowels in honor of their deities. From these practices descended into the musical part of the earliest Christian worship a certain rhapsodic and exalted style of delivery, which is believed to have been St. ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... the name of the group of islands upon one of which the shipwrecked Nicolo was rescued by Sinclair. The name Faeroislander sounded to Italian ears as Frislanda, and was uniformly so written.[285] Then the pronunciation of Shetland was helped by prefixing a vowel sound, as is common in Italian, and so it came to be Estland and Esland. This led young Nicolo's eye in two or three places to confound it with Islanda, or Iceland, and probably in one place with Irlanda, or ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... and evanescent that they go for comparatively little in questions of Etymology. Tan is equivalent to T—n; the place of the dash being filled by any vowel. T is readily replaced by th or d, and n by ng; as is known to every Philological student. The object, which in English we call tin, and its name, are peculiar and important in this connection, as combining the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... word beginning with a vowel, or with the letter "h," the final "e" was almost without exception mute; and in such cases, in the plural forms and infinitives of verbs, the terminal "n" is generally retained for the sake of euphony. No reader who is acquainted with ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... with the Slav languages it has a sixth vowel, viz. "r"—hence such words as "Srb" (Serb), "trg" (place or square), and "Trst" (Triest). It is only necessary to roll the "r" to overcome this seeming anomaly of a collection of consonants. The language is spoken exactly as it is written, as for instance Italian, but ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... of an instrument is the vowel produced by the human mouth in any particular position. Each vowel appears to consist, physically, of certain high notes produced by the resonance of the mouth cavity. In the position for "ah", the cavity gives a certain tone; in the position for "ee" it gives a higher tone. Meanwhile, the pitch of the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... gegedov' u minda (two hands and another). [Note the "v" at the end of gegedo. The full word is really gegedove; but it is shortened to gegedo, unless the next word is a vowel. Also note the "u." There are two words for "and," namely ta and une. The "u" here is the une shortened, and put instead ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... their turn the vowel sounds,—the symbols, dash and dot, With rules and regulations charging us "Forget-me-not." Wish you could have heard us sound them. It was amusing, too; Seemed like talking Chinese language,—ah, [a], ee; aw, o, oo. Then came the hooks with many crooks to puzzle and perplex; They ...
— Silver Links • Various
... different lights, or brought into connexion with other facts, according to endless diversities of permutation and combination, furnish grounds for such eternal successions of new speculations as make the facts themselves virtually new. The same Hebrew words are read by different sets of vowel points, and the same hieroglyphics are deciphered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... Quantitie to the Verse?" The amiable Edmonde seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this sentence. He instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue English to misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for example, make the vowel in debt long, in the teeth of use ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... has the soft musical sound that pervades the whole composition. It is exceedingly interesting to note, as has already been mentioned, how Goldsmith altered and altered these lines until he had got them full of gentle vowel sounds. Where, indeed, in the English language could one find ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... had learned to pronounce with any degree of distinctness previous to March, 1890, were PAPA, MAMMA, BABY, SISTER. These words she had caught without instruction from the lips of friends. It will be seen that they contain three vowel and six consonant elements, and these formed the foundation for her first ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... for its future perpetuity, whether by writing, or in oral explanation. And here, again, we note the use of secrecy in matters of power. From him is derived the present method of reading Hebrew, by what is usually known as the {56} vowel points in the Masoretic text. The Masorites were a set of men whose profession it was to write out copies of the Hebrew Scriptures. And the present vowel points were used by them, as derived from the secret writings of the Cabbalists. ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... an insuperable difficulty in English, on account of its irregularity and elusiveness, is in Esperanto invariably on the last vowel but one. ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen
... eight in a list. Give them as in experiment No. 3, and compare the results with those of that experiment. What do the results indicate as to the value to memory of meaningful material? What educational inferences can you make? In preparing the syllables, put a vowel between two consonants, and use no syllable that is a ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... spelling, punctuation and capitalization in the primary text are unchanged. The distinction between u (vowel) and v (consonant) is as in the original. Typographical errors are listed at ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... strengthen the expression of the feelings and the interest of the situation, without interrupting the action. I have therefore refrained from interrupting the actor in the fervor of his dialogue by introducing the accustomed tedious ritournelle; nor have I broken his phrase at an opportune vowel that the flexibility of his voice might be exhibited in a lengthy flourish; nor have I written phrases for the orchestra to afford the singer opportunity to take a long breath preparatory to the accepted flourish; nor have I dared to hurry over the second part of an aria, when ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... gives the rough sound to the r when he can help it, and often displays considerable ingenuity in avoiding it even before a vowel. ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... alphabetized as "ae". The letter I is alphabetized according to its phonetic value, vowel before consonant. J is not used. Thorn / and eth (capital does not occur) are alphabetized as "th". The letters U and V are shown with the form used in their source documents, but are alphabetized ...
— A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - From A.D. 1150 To 1580 • A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat
... while quite uniform among its divisions, varies considerably from that of any of their coast neighbors. There is at once noticeable a more common use of obscure vowel and consonant sounds, such as b, f, E, a, and k, in the beginning, end or even in the body of the word; while the letter f, seldom found in Philippine dialects, is here very common; and finally, there is ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... tremendous thing in vision, or thought as well as sound. So he has everlasting variation; manages his storms and billows; and so I think his music is greater in effect than Homer's—would still be greater, could we be sure of Homer's tones and vowel- values; as I think his vision goes deeper into the realm of ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... these typically occur as the first vowel in a Malay word (mostly e, but sometimes a, i, u). Letters with breve accents have been replaced with just ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... The vowel sounds of w and y are the same as those of u and i. A, e, and o are always vowels. I, u, w, ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... beautiful as the words.[Footnote: "The peculiarly liquid quality of Polynesian phonetics is impossible for foreigners to acquire. Europeans who attempt a mastery of these sounds invariably suffer from what etymologists call metabelia, or vowel complaint."—Prof. ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent, and is divided by the caesura into two short verses, bound together by alliteration: two accented syllables in the first short line and one in the second, beginning with any vowel or the same consonant"[40] (or consonants giving about the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... that people wished to heighten and dignify their effect by a regular framework or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the simplest kind, not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty or thirty lines apiece, all ending with a similar vowel sound. And here, as elsewhere in that early poetry, much of the interest lies in the spectacle of the formation of a new artistic sense. A novel art is arising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs of Aucassin and Nicolette, which seem always on ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... have been used in this version of the text. When used, it indicates that the vowel it surrounds is a long vowel with a ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... This correction shows not only that Milton had theories about spelling, but also that he found means, though his sight was gone, to ascertain whether his rules had been carried out by his printer; and in itself this fact justifies a facsimile reprint. What the principle in the use of the double vowel exactly was (and it is found to affect the other monosyllabic pronouns) it is not so easy to discover, though roughly it is clear the reduplication was intended to mark emphasis. For example, in ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the aspirate, Fuddy-Duddy, the incapable terrapin, came to a dead halt, and before the vowel had died away up the ravine had folded up all his eight legs and lain down in the dusty road, regardless of the effect upon his derned skin. The queer little man slid off his seat to the ground and started up the dell without deigning to look back ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... small circles that five minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... broke from Duncan, into the midst of which rushed another from Mrs Catanach, similar, but coarse in vowel and harsh ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... grammatical forms. In phonology the most marked difference from both is the substitution of s or z, with a tendency, intensified in later Cornish, to the sound of j or ch, for d or t of Welsh and Breton. Cornish agrees with Breton in not prefixing a vowel (y in Welsh) to words beginning with s followed by a consonant, and its vowel sounds are generally simpler and less diphthongalised than those of Welsh. It agrees with Welsh in changing what one ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds. ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... statements which are quoted here and which should be borne well in mind in considering what follows. "The Second Race had a 'Sound Language,' to wit, chant-like sounds composed of vowels alone." From this developed "monosyllabic speech which was the vowel parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic languages mixed with hard consonants still in use among the yellow races which are known to the anthropologist. The linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative languages.... The inflectional speech, the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... consonants, or at least on the very common letter l, a war of mere extermination. A hiatus is agreeable to any Polynesian ear; the ear even of the stranger soon grows used to these barbaric voids; but only in the Marquesan will you find such names as Haaii and Paaaeua, when each individual vowel must ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or was it some inner light from the depths of that great spirit, which shone out in all his countenance, and filled his eyes with awful inspiration, as he spoke, in a voice calm and sweet, sad and regretful, and yet terrible from the slow distinctness of every vowel ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... ... My best guide. Observe the juxtaposition of mine and my in these lines. Mine is frequent before a vowel, especially when the possessive adjective is not emphatic. In Shakespeare 'mine' is almost always found before "eye," "ear," etc., where no emphasis ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... returned the timid equestrian, laying the emphasis on the final syllable of his companion's title, and pronouncing the first as if it were spelt with the third instead of the second vowel. ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... Pouchskin was driving—all five suddenly coming to a dead stop! Pouchskin endeavoured to urge them forward—crying out the usual signal, Ha; but, in his anxious eagerness, Pouchskin placed the accent after the vowel, instead of before it; and instead of Ha! his exclamation sounded Ah! The latter being the command for the dogs to halt, of course only kept them steady in their places; and they stood without offering to move a leg. By good fortune, ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... harmonics (multiples), the wave-train consists of a complex series of condensations and rarefactions of the air or other transmitting medium. In the case of mere noises the train of vibrations is irregular and follows no definite order. This is the difference between vowel sounds and other musical tones on the one hand and all unmusical sounds (or ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... Element or Factor of Oral Speech, the Absolute Reality or 'Affirmation' of Language, is Vocal Utterance, or, specifically, the kind of Sound called VOWEL. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is quite mistaken, and I only ask you to listen to what I have to say on the subject. Your masculine verse has only twelve poetic syllables, and the feminine thirteen. All Martelli's lines have fourteen syllables, except those that finish with a long vowel, which at the end of a line always counts as two syllables. You will observe that the first hemistitch in Martelli always consists of seven syllables, while in French it only has six. Your friend Pierre Jacques was either stone deaf or ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... one brought to its interpretation more experience of life, a finer emotional sense. Where, in his boyhood, he had felt only the perfect, the almost austere beauty of form, the subtle interplay of vowel-sounds, the rush and fulness of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the close-packed significance of each line, the allusiveness of each word—his imagination lured hither and thither on fresh trails of thought, and perpetually spurred by the sense that, beyond what he had already ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... New England countryman never flattens a vowel; if he changes it he always makes it sharp. He would be more likely to say: "Pleasure does make us Yankee kind er winch, as if 'twas suthin' paid for by the inch." There are other instances of similar sort; but, nevertheless, if the primitive ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... them, disemboweled them and warped them all out of shape. Have you ever heard a real ingrowing Englishman start a word in the roof of his mouth and then back away from it as if it was red-hot and had prickles on it? It's interesting. They seem to think it is indecent to come brazenly out and sound a vowel. ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... Demodocus, to sing at the games in the court of Alcinous. Phaeacia is the Homeric island of Atlantis; an image of noble and wise government, concealed, (how slightly!) merely by the change of a short vowel for a long one in the name of its queen; yet misunderstood by all later writers, (even by Horace, in his "pinguis, Phaeaxque"). That fable expresses the perpetual error of men in thinking that grace and dignity can only be reached by the soldier, and never by the artisan; so that ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... true throughout The Country Squire that every pair of lines taken alternately ends in rhymes which are perfect or nearly so. Now a perfect rhyme is one in which the two rhyming syllables are both accented, the vowel sound and the consonants which follow the vowels are identical, and the sounds preceding the vowel are different. For instance, the words smile and style rhyme. Both of these are monosyllables and hence accented. The vowel sound is the long ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... French Numerals are differently pronounced according 1st—as they stand alone, or are joined to Noun or Adjective beginning, 2nd—with Vowel. ...
— The Aural System • Anonymous
... according to M. Ghil and his organ Les Ecrits pour l'Art, it would appear that the syllables of the French language evoke in us the sensations of different colours; consequently the timbre of the different instruments. The vowel u corresponds to the colour yellow, and therefore to the sound of flutes. Arthur Rimbaud was, it is true, first in the field with these pleasant and genial theories; but M. Ghil informs us that Rimbaud was mistaken in many things, particularly in coupling the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... contractions, printed as vowels with a line over them, were used in the original to indicate a vowel followed by an 'm' or 'n'. They have been expanded as follows (the contraction is marked by [] round ...
— A Declaration of the Causes, which mooved the chiefe Commanders of the Nauie of her most excellent Maiestie the Queene of England, in their voyage and expedition for Portingal, to take and arrest in t • Anonymous
... severity, but necessary in his situation, was, at the very same time, exercised by the protector, in the capital punishment of Gerard and Vowel, two royalists, who were accused of conspiring against his life. He had erected a high court of justice for their trial; an infringement of the ancient laws which at this time was become familiar, but one to which no custom ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... into something figurative, by which they designate, seldom very appropriately, some object for which they have no positive name. Engro properly means a fellow, and engri, which is the feminine or neuter modification, a thing. When the noun or verb terminates in a vowel, engro is turned into mengro, and engri into mengri. I have already shown how, by affixing engro to kaun, the Gypsies have invented a word to express a hare. In like manner, by affixing engro to pov, earth, they have coined a word for ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... necessarily "longer" than the unaccented, except as the rhythm happens to make it so. This idea is very fully developed and with great wealth of curious Old English illustrations. Under the designation of "tone-color" he treats very suggestively of rhyme, alliteration, and vowel and consonant distribution, showing how the recurrence of euphonic vowels and consonants secures that rich variety of tone-color which music gives in orchestration. The work thus breaks away from the classic grammarian's tables of trochees and anapaests, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... prints both higdifatu and calidilia. Higdifatu is manifestly vessels of hides, such as skin and leather bottles and buckets. The ig is either a clerical error of the monkish scribe for y, or the g is a silent letter producing the quantity of the vowel. "I buy hides and fells," says the workman, "and with my craft I make of them shoes of different kinds; leathern hose, flasks, and higdifatu." The Latin word in this MS. is casidilia, written with the long straight s. Du Cange explains capsilis ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... dome resounded Y! In sullen vengeance, I, disdain'd reply: The pedant swung his felon cudgel round, And knock'd the groaning vowel ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... period of the origin in Egypt of the belief in the existence of an almighty God who was One, the inscriptions show us that this Being was called by a name which was something like Neter, [Footnote: There is no e in Egyptian, and this vowel is added merely to make the word pronounceable.] the picture sign for which was an axe-head, made probably of stone, let into a long wooden handle. The coloured picture character shews that the axe-head was fastened into the handle by thongs ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... twelfth century, and must have received its present form in Picardy. It is written, as you see, in alternate snatches of verse and prose. The verse, which was chanted, is not rhymed as a rule, but each laisse, or screed, as in the "Chanson de Roland," runs on the same final assonance, or vowel ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... accomplished by "mouthing" the sounds from the larynx. The distinct sounds, or words, are usually complex in nature, being made up of two or more elementary sounds. These are classed either as vowels or consonants and are represented by the different letters of the alphabet. The vowel sounds are made with the mouth open and are more nearly the pure vibrations of the vocal cords. The consonants are modifications of the vocal cord vibrations produced by the tongue, ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... for Chaucer's pronunciation, you will not get that accurately without much study, which were better spent on more important matters; so be content with a few rules, which aim simply to help you enjoy the reading. As a general principle, the root vowel of a word was broadly sounded, and the rest slurred over. The characteristic sound of a was as in "far"; e was sounded like a, i like e, and all diphthongs as broadly as possible,—in "floures" (flowers), for example, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the regular form of the subjunctiveCantet. The only latin vowel preserved after the tonic syllable is aFrench e (mute). Thus contat"chante" which form has in modern French usurped ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... have a semi-vowel written [lr] the sound of which in words of the masculine gender approaches l, in those of the neuter gender r. The o and u, and the t and d, are also frequently blended. The w has not the German but the soft English sound, as ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... heretic. I said he was terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow. Then gave me recipe for what he calls RISOTTO ALLA BERGAMASCA. When he pronounces a soft O he protrudes his full carnal lips as if he kissed the vowel. Has he? And could he repent? Yes, he could: and cry two round rogue's tears, one ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... sound in initial kn, as in knave, still sounded in Ger. Knabe, boy. French gets over the difficulty by inserting a vowel between the two consonants, e.g., canif is a Germanic word cognate with Eng. knife. This is a common device in French when a word of Germanic origin begins with two consonants. Cf. Fr. derive, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... harmonious whole the several results desirable to be attained in a series of school reading-books. These include good pictorial illustrations, a combination of the word and phonic methods, careful grading, drill on the peculiar combinations of letters that represent vowel-sounds, correct spelling, exercises well arranged for the pupil's preparation by himself (so that he shall learn the great lessons of self-help, self-dependence, the habit of application), exercises that develop a practical command of correct forms of expression, good literary taste, ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... for this tone emission is, first of all, the cultivation of the breath prop, then attacking the vowel sound o o in the medium voice, which requires a low position of the larynx, and exercises on the ascending scale until the higher notes have been brought down, as it were, and gain some of the body and support of the lower notes ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... plaint. Harrowing as it was, the sounds were almost like a recitation of the alphabet. A woman who had adopted me as her nephew said they called it the "Ue haaneinei" That, literally, is "to make a weeping on the side." The etiquette of it was intricate and precise. Each vowel was memorized with exactness. It ran, as my adopted aunt repeated it over ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... gift inherent in the Dutch race came to Edward's rescue in his attempt to master the English language. He soon noted many points of similarity between English and his native tongue; by changing a vowel here and there he could make a familiar Dutch word into a correct English word. As both languages had developed from the old Frisian tongue, the conquest of English did not prove as difficult as he had expected. At all events, he ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... chaise in which the two old ladies from Barlton drive up to get their paper of an evening, the servant from the inn, the newsboy whose mother keeps a sweetshop—they are all my village friends. The glorious Sussex accent, whose only vowel is the broad "a", grows but more rich and emphatic from the necessity of impressing itself upon foreign intruders. The smoke also of the train as it skirts the Downs is part and parcel of what has become (thanks to the trains) our encloistered country ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... my father; kos, thy father; osun, his or her father. The vowel in this word is sounded like ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Americans, bearing colored leis, or wreaths of flowers, which they waved at friends on board, and with which they bedecked them as soon as they came off the gangplank. It was a Babel of tongues in which the strange, vowel-choked language of the Hawaiians ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... and twelfth centuries. But it has passed from copy to copy in the course of generations. The methods of versification change, and, after line 2647, "there are traces of change in the language. The word co, followed by a vowel, hitherto frequent, never again reappears. The vowel i, of li, nominative masculine of the article" (li Reis, "the king"), "never occurs in the text after line 2647. Up to that point it is elided or not at pleasure.... There is a progressive tendency towards hiatus. After line ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... animals is a vowel form of speech. It lacks the consonantal elements, the characteristic of articulation. In this man seems to have at first agreed with them. The infant begins its vocal utterances with simple cries; only at a later age does it begin to articulate. If we may judge from the development ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... phonetic, or given after the Mexican rebus method of denoting names. If not a simple ideogram, this prefix is most probably used in some sense phonetically with reference chiefly to the k sound. The circle of dots is used here probably to indicate the vowel sound u or o. But in making this suggestion I do not by any means intend to suggest that the Maya scribes had reached that stage of advancement where they could indicate each sound by a character. All I wish to assert is that I find in numerous cases characters accompanied ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... pronunciation of which is obscure. (2) The consonant 'ain, to which the untrained European ear is deaf, and which in consequence is often omitted. Less frequently it may be over-conscientiously inserted in a place where it does not exist. Sometimes the 'ain and its associated vowel are transposed (as M'alula for Ma'lula) making unpronounceable combinations of consonants. (3) The letter kaf, often dropped in pronunciation, and therefore often omitted. (4) The letter ghain, which an unaccustomed ear confuses ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... about the relation of words to one another in a sentence. In the treatment of individual words, written and spoken Latin developed along different lines. In English we make little distinction between the quantity of vowels, but in Latin of course a given vowel was either long or short, and literary tradition became so fixed in this matter that the professional poets of the Augustan age do not tolerate any deviation from it. There are indications, however, that the common people did not observe the rules of quantity in their integrity. We can readily ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... ten, twelve, or fourteen. Southey cannot believe that the prudent and practical Chaucer would have placed his verse, intended for general reception, in the jeopardy of a reader's discretion for determining when the verse required the sounding, and when the silence, of a vowel, by its nature free to be sounded or left silent, as exigency might require. But he misapprehends the proposed remedy; and the discretion which he supposes is not given. In the two languages from which ours is immediately derived, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... in the Y.M.C.A. huts where the padre toils and the layman sweats day and night for the well-being of the soldier men. In some of the huts it is actually possible to get a bath. It is always possible to get dry. 'Twas Black Jack Vowel, good friend Jack, who wrote over to tell us that there was no hut at one ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... these are made to do double duty, as K is also T, and L is also R. The most northern island of the group, Kauai, is as often pronounced as if it began with a T, and Kalo is usually Taro. It is a very musical language. Each syllable and word ends with a vowel, and there are none of our rasping and sibilant consonants. In their soft phraseology our hard rough surnames undergo a metamorphosis, as Fisk into Filikina, Wilson into Wilikina. Each vowel is distinctly pronounced, and usually with the Italian sound. The volcano is pronounced as if ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... of a varying proportion between stressed or heavily accented syllables and unstressed. That is clear even though we are unable to discriminate the proportion in every case or even to tell whether there were fixed rules for it; the vowel-system of our Hebrew text being possibly different from what prevailed in ancient Hebrew. But on the whole it is probable that as in other primitive poetries(42) there were no exact or rigorous rules as to the proportion of beats or stresses in the single lines. For the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... both cases where any ruggedness in the natural collocation of the words may present itself. For instance, change in the accent, the elision or the addition of a letter or syllable, the lengthening of a vowel, transposition, and a hundred other little artifices. The euphony itself, though sometimes a little imperfect, is also studied with the same kind of care in the older and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... place of the inflectional terminations brought to a high state of artificial perfection in Latin; and the wholesale suppression of unaccented syllables had so contracted the Latin words that they were often scarcely recognizable. The modification of vowel sounds increased the efficacy of the disguise assumed by Latin words masquerading in the Romanic dialects throughout Gaul; and the Celtic and other native words in current use to designate the interests and occupations of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... are informed that the Bantu languages "constitute a very distinct type of speech which, as contrasted with others amongst the group of Negro tongues, is remarkable as a rule for Italian melodiousness, simplicity and frequency of its vowel sounds, and the comparative ease with which its exemplars can be acquired and spoken by Europeans" (p. 15). "This one Negro language family now covers the whole of the southern third of Africa, with the exception ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... the vowel points and accents in Hebrew; invented by the Massorites, or authors of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood |
