"Written language" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nimbleness and strength by playing what is worth playing. Take good music, take Chopin or Bach or Beethoven, and practise one particular etude or fugue or sonata; you may choose anything you like, and learn your nimbleness and strength that way. Read, too; read for a couple of hours every day. The written language of music must become so familiar to you that it is to you precisely what a book or a newspaper is, so that whether you read it aloud—which is playing—or sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the fender, reading it not aloud on the ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... represent the quantities of type found in the type-cases of a printing-office; for, after puzzling over the question of the relative frequency of the occurrence of the different letters in the written language, a visit to the printing-office easily ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... the youth of American birth, is that Thomas Jefferson wrote our famous Declaration of Independence. His bold, free, independent nature, admirably fitted him for the writing of this remarkable document. To him was given the task of embodying, in written language, the sentiments and the principles for which, at that moment, a liberty-loving people were battling with their lives. He succeeded, because he wrote the Declaration while his heart burned with that same patriotic ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... is the rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express, and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood. After what has been lately talked of Highland Bards, and Highland genius, many will startle when they are told, that the Earse never was a written language; that there is not in the world an Earse manuscript a hundred years old; and that the sounds of the Highlanders were never expressed by letters, till some little books of piety were translated, and a metrical version of the Psalms was made ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... complete history in written language, but we have some very definite history in the rocks and hills ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... Latin was the language of the country after its conquest by Julius Caesar; then came the Northern hordes, when language became corrupted, until, in the time of Charlemagne, German was the Court language, Latin the written language, and the Romance dialect, still in its barbaric state, was the speech of the people. The Gauls in the North, who used the Romance, were also called the Roman-Wallons; they were distinguished from Charlemagne's German subjects, while in ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... that the Gaelic has been for many ages a written language. It is equally certain that its orthography, since it was first committed to writing, has undergone {23} considerable changes. In this respect it has shared the common ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... is this to be at all wondered at, when we reflect on the barbarous state of those nations in their infancy, the imperfection of traditionary accounts of what had transpired centuries before, and in many instances the entire absence of a written language, by which, either to perpetuate events, or enable the philosopher by analogy of language to ascertain their affinity with other nations. Conjectural then as must be every disquisition as to the ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... manuscripts. None of the old families had a single letter in Erse that we heard of. You say it is likely that they could write. The learned, if any learned there were, could; but knowing by that learning, some written language, in that language they wrote, as letters had never been applied to their own. If there are manuscripts, let them be shewn, with some proof that they are not forged for the occasion. You say many can remember parts ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... time within the temple, by their glowing fire that blazed so cheerfully, the window and door closed tightly by skins, shutting out the cold air. Here they amused themselves in recounting past scenes, and strange wild legends with which they had become familiar. Without a written language, the Indian preserves his national and domestic history solely by oral instruction, handed down from father to son. Thus every tribe has its own legends, while many vague traditions of national history are peculiar to the ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... Wagner, and which is very difficult to describe: it always strikes me as though Wagner were continually addressing enemies; for the style of all these tracts more resembles that of the spoken than of the written language, hence they will seem much more intelligible if heard read aloud, in the presence of his enemies, with whom he cannot be on familiar terms, and towards whom he must therefore show some reserve and aloofness, The entrancing ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Language itself is the most important of these means. It is not altogether clear what the first steps were in the development of spoken language; but we know that among uncivilized peoples conversation is aided, and often largely carried on, by signs made with the hands. Written language certainly developed from the use of pictures, which were gradually curtailed into HIEROGLYPHICS, such as were used by the ancient Egyptians, and finally developed into the ALPHABET, each letter of which ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... arrived at a strange and wonderful spelling of his own name. Tarzan is derived from the two ape words TAR and ZAN, meaning white skin. It was given him by his foster mother, Kala, the great she-ape. When Tarzan first put it into the written language of his own people he had not yet chanced upon either WHITE or SKIN in the dictionary; but in a primer he had seen the picture of a little white boy and so he wrote his name ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is no paralysis of the tongue or speech-forming organs. As a rule the intellect is unaffected, the patient has the ideas, but lacks the power to give them proper expression through words, written language, or gesture. If the patient is enable to write, the condition is known as agraphia. Word-blindness, word-deafness, etc., are terms ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... any other men of power—fanciful dreaming tea-drinkers, who, without logic enough to analyze a single idea, or imagination enough to form one original image, or learning enough to distinguish between the written language of Englishmen and the spoken jargon of Cockneys, presume to talk with contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits the world ever produced, merely because they did not happen to exert their faculties in laborious affected descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots, or cascades ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... of the classical period in India were composing in a foreign language. Every writer, especially every poet, composing in any language, writes in what may be called a strange idiom; that is, he does not write as he talks. Yet it is true that the gap between written language and vernacular was wider in Kalidasa's day than it has often been. The Hindus themselves regard twelve years' study as requisite for the mastery of the "chief of all sciences, the science of grammar." That Kalidasa had mastered this science his works ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... people possessing no written language, no literature, no knowledge beyond that handed down from father to son, the first step towards right living, apart from the preaching of the Gospel, is education. Schools go hand in hand with churches in missionary effort. Mary began hers before she had the buildings in which to teach, one at Ekenge ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... know; it has no peculiar written character, the Lepcha or Nagri being used. Dr. Campbell, from whom I have, derived most of my information respecting these people, was informed,* [See "Dorjiling Guide," p. 89. Calcutta, 1845.] on good authority, that they had once a written language, now lost; and that it was compounded from many others by a sage of antiquity. The same authority stated that their Lepcha name "Chung" is a corruption of that of their place of residence; possibly ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Written language probably originated in an analytical process analogous to the language of gesture. Like that, it: (1) isolates terms; (2) arranges them in a certain order; (3) translates thoughts in a crude and somewhat vague form. A curious example of this may be found in Max Mueller's "Chips from ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... nothing;—who can thread their way through a crowd where a tapeworm would be squeezed to death;—whose writing desk is usually another man's back; and who sketch out a much better speech between an orator's shoulder blades than he is making in front;—whose written language is a perplexity compared with which Greek is a relaxation and Sanscrit a positive amusement;—who deal in adjectives, and know their precise value, and how to administer them, as an apothecary knows the drugs that are boxed and bottled on his shelves;—who are less men than parts ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... not always filled by trained workmen; it was extremely probable that the experienced chemist was already making his success as a gold-miner, with a lawyer and a physician for his partners, and Mr. Kane's inexperienced position was by no means a novel one. A slight knowledge of Latin as a written language, an American schoolboy's acquaintance with chemistry and natural philosophy, were deemed sufficient by his partner, a regular physician, for practical cooperation in the vending of drugs and putting up of prescriptions. He ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... flowing strip of paper, as well as when he sees it. As he lies in his cot at midnight, he will expound the passing message without striking a light to see it. But this is only what may be said of any written language. You can read this article to your wife, or she can read it, as she prefers; that is, she chooses whether it shall address her eye or her ear. But the long-and-short alphabet of Morse and his imitators despises such narrow range. It addresses whichever of the ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... methinks I see Thereon written language three Hebrew and Latyn And Greek methinks written thereon, For it is hard ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... which have proved to be of the greatest and most permanent value. Perhaps nowhere else than in the archives of the old Assyrian and Babylonian temples could we find such an instructive exhibition of the development of the art of expressing facts and ideas in written language. The historical inscriptions, indeed, exhibit a variety of incidents, but have a painful monotony of subject and a conventional grandeur of style. In the contracts we find men struggling for exactness of statement and ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... know how entirely Carlyle loathed that kind of utterance, how much he felt the restraints and limits it involved. And for that reason, the book is the simplest and most easily legible of his works, with the least of his mannerism and the largest concessions to the written language of sublunary mortals. Nearly all the judgments he passes are not only sound, but now almost universally accepted. To deal with the heroic in history, he needed, as he said, six months rather than six days. It was intended, he told his ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... German. The most noted of his works, and the one from which the following extract is taken, is his "Autobiography." This book is "one of the half dozen most widely popular books ever printed," and has been published in nearly every written language. Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society, and established an institution which has since grown into the University of Pennsylvania. His life is a noble example of the results of industry and perseverance, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... passing that a considerable part of the K.C. is in rhythmic prose—some of it declamatory. I have endeavoured throughout this work to represent, or reproduce to the mind and heart of the reader the spoken word and intonation—not written language. It really should be read aloud, especially the descriptive and ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... coming suddenly upon some pleasant view, or unexpectedly entering an apparently previously unexplored nook, more than atoned for such trifling annoyances. Without digression in some degree, neither spoken nor written language can be made entertaining to the person addressed. Who is more discursive than the Autocrat, the Czar of table-talkers; and whose productions are more charming or wiser? We do not do our everyday thinking ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... suggestions as to the condition of Japanese life and thought twelve hundred years ago. Remembering that they were written before any modern European literature had yet taken form, one is startled to find how little the Japanese written language has changed in the course of so many centuries. Allowing for a few obsolete words, and sundry slight changes of pronunciation, the ordinary Japanese reader to-day can enjoy these early productions of his native muse with ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... To what has been said in the text, may be added the following apposite remarks of Squier: "In the absence of a written language or forms of expression capable of conveying abstract ideas, we can readily comprehend the necessity, among a primitive people, of a symbolic system. That symbolism in a great degree resulted from this necessity, is very obvious; and that, associated with man's primitive ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... by visible signs, grammar has no control; and that the speaking which the art or science of grammar teaches, is exclusively that which has reference to a knowledge of letters. It is the certain tendency of writing, to improve speech. And in proportion as books are multiplied, and the knowledge of written language is diffused, local dialects, which are beneath the dignity of grammar, will always be found to grow fewer, and their differences less. There are, in the various parts of the world, many languages to which the art of grammar has never yet been applied; and to ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... delightful consideration, that it has pleased God to secure to us a written language. Are we grateful enough for the gift? Do we think enough of the privilege of conversing in this way with friends in every quarter ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... attempt to show how this process of improvement is effected, and what is its limit. I conceive then that these gifted writers act upon the spoken and written language by means of the particular schools which form about them respectively. Their style, using the word in a large sense, forcibly arrests the reader, and draws him on to imitate it, by virtue of what is excellent in it, in spite of such defects as, in common ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... language cannot be left out of account in the question of the racial origin of any people, and the Japanese language has, as I have said, long been a puzzle for the philologist. In the early times we are told the Japanese had no written language. The language in use before the opening up of communications with Korea and China stood alone. Indeed there is only one language outside Japan which has any affinity therewith, that is the language of the inhabitants ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... book of Nature was not all that John studied in these days. He learned to read also the written language of men, and studied the wise and holy words which have kept goodness before men's sight since knowledge began. Until now John had never opened a book or held a pen. But the Hermit taught him wisely and well, and soon he was in a fair way to become ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... walls, l. 76. The application of mankind, in the early ages of society, to the imitative arts of painting, carving, statuary, and the casting of figures in metals, seems to have preceded the discovery of letters; and to have been used as a written language to convey intelligence to their distant friends, or to transmit to posterity the history of themselves, or of their discoveries. Hence the origin of the hieroglyphic figures which crowded the walls ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... know, they are belied in this respect. Like other hill people, they are famous for the muscular development of their legs:—in this last point the women have generally the inferiority. They have no written language. Their clothing is inferior; it is, however, made of cotton, and is of their own manufacture;—that of the men consists of a mere jacket and an apology for a dhoti,—that of the women is more copious, and at any rate quite decent: they are very fond of ornaments, especially beads, the quantities ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... French as in English, and she did understand something of the formation of her sentences. Fred Neville had been at an excellent school, but it may be doubted whether he could have explained his own written language. Nevertheless he was a little ashamed of his Kate, and thought that Miss Mellerby might perceive her ignorance if ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... A feature supported by Unix, ITS, and some other OSes that allows two or more logged-in users to set up a real-time on-line conversation. It combines the immediacy of talking with all the precision (and verbosity) that written language entails. It is difficult to communicate inflection, though conventions have arisen for some of these (see the section on writing style in ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Slang, universally heard and understood, knocks in vain for admission into American literature. It expatiates in journals, in novels of dialect, and in works, like George Ade's, which are designed for its exposition. But it has no part in the fabric of the gravely written language. Men of letters have disdained its use with a scrupulousness worthy our own eighteenth century. The best of them have written an English as pure as a devout respect for tradition can make it. Though they have travelled far in space and thought, they have anchored their craft securely in the past. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Bible or not, it actually proves that the Natives of that Country where the Book was found, had been on that Continent many Ages, and could not be the descendants of a Colony planted there after the discovery of Columbus in 1492. No written Language or Alphabetical Characters can be totally forgotten by any people, within the space of 160, or 170 Years, which was the period that intervened between the discovery of ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... and you will find that they are only of brass. You see men who are talking to crowds around them, and others who are apparently amusing listening groups by a kind of song or recitation; these are the earliest bards and orators; but all their signs of thought are oral, for written language does not yet exist." The next scene which appeared was one of varied business and imagery. I saw a man, who bore in his hands the same instruments as our modern smiths, presenting a vase, which appeared to be made of iron, amidst the acclamations of an assembled multitude ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... have been no suspicion of doubt that the victor in the awful contest could and would dictate trade terms and privileges everywhere in the Celestial Empire. If Japan won, the Japanese would surely exploit commercially their great neighbor, whose written language is nearly identical with their own—this would be but natural to the Mikado's people, teeming with aptitude as manufacturers and traders, and recognizing the necessity for recouping ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary English in which ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... already breaking down with his labours at Rewa. With them also came a printer, a printing-press, and book-binding materials. Early in 1839 Saint Mark's Gospel and a catechism in Fijian were printed,—an important event in the history of a people who three years before had no written language, and who seemed sunk in the utter depths of darkness and moral degradation. Fiji was indebted for Mr Hunt to the Christian liberality of a lady—Mrs Brackenbury, of Raithbury Hall, Lincolnshire, who offered to pay all the expenses of his outfit and passage, and 50 pounds a year ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... than observation teaches. For instance, every observer of children knows that memory for objects develops before memory for words; that memory for gestures preceded memory for words; that memory for oral language preceded memory for written language; that memory for concrete objects preceded memory for abstractions. Further knowledge of the development of special memories should be accompanied by knowledge as to how far this development is dependent on training and to what extent lack of memory ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... civilized world in Roland Clewe's account of the discovery of the north pole. His paper on the subject, which was the first intimation the public had of the great news, was telegraphed to every part of the world and translated into nearly every written language. Sardis became a Mecca for explorers and scientific people at home and abroad, and honors of every kind were showered by geographical and other learned societies upon Clewe and the brave company who ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... barbarous people, borrowed their civilization from the former, and, having less tendency toward development, retained the original symbols and figures of the former, adding only ornamentation and details, but not advancing to any great extent toward a written language. ...
— Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts • Cyrus Thomas
... animals with a certain degree of contempt, and flatter our vanity in qualifying the baser part of our sexual appetite by the term animal instinct. But we are really very unjust toward animals. This injustice is partly due to the fact that vocal and written language gives us a means of penetrating into the psychology of our fellow creatures. By the aid of the common symbolism of our thoughts it is easy for us to compare them. Language thus enables us to construct a general human psychology. The absence of language, even in the higher animals, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... understanding, sweeps the dust slate level with his hand, and with his forefinger inscribes similar characters. They are talking. They cannot speak to each other, but they can write. Long ago one borrowed the other's written language, and long before that, untold generations ago, they diverged from a common root, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... method of talking to young children, as well as using words that are not found in any written language, (called child's talk,) is decidedly wrong. A child will pronounce and understand the application of a correct word as quickly as an ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... the writing with every mark of incredulity and surprise. Of course it could make nothing of the strange characters; but it evidently accepted them as proof that Bradley possessed knowledge of a written language of his own, for following the Englishman's entry it made a ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be seen that it is illegitimate to use any pictographic matter of a date anterior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus for historic purposes; but it has a legitimate use of profound interest, as these pictographs exhibit the beginning of written language and the beginning of pictorial art, yet undifferentiated; and if the scholars of America will collect and study the vast body of this material scattered everywhere—over the valleys and on the mountain sides—from it can ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... Much benefit is derived from allowing the children of the class to dramatize a story after they have read it and represented it by means of pantomime. Although there is ample room for written work, it is oral rather than written language that should receive ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... dispensed with, and the symbolic characters can be used in increasingly complex ways, in like manner the minds of men living in successive centuries have evolved. While an evolution of human conceptual processes in general is not necessarily implied by the evolution of the forms of written language, the former process is in part demonstrated by the latter in so far as the change from the writing of pictures to the use of conventional symbols involves an advance in human ideas of the interpretation and ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Shakspeare, but the inspiration excited in a kindred mind by a creative genius. In the dialogue, he put in practice Lessing's principles of nature, only with greater boldness; for in it he rejected not only versification and all embellishments, but also disregarded the laws of written language to a degree of licence which had never been ventured upon before. He avoided all poetical circumlocutions; the picture was to be the very thing itself; and thus he sounded in our ears the tone of a remote age in a degree ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... States of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, have now a reservation of nearly four million acres in the tract known as the Indian Territory. They number about fifteen thousand, and are increasing. They have their own written language, their national constitution and laws, their churches, schools, and academies, their judges and courts. Their dwellings consist of five hundred frame and three thousand five hundred log houses. During the year ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... the same facts are true in written language, in composition. But in lessons of this type the instructor will not find conditions so favorable: Talking is natural, writing is artificial; to speak is instinctive, to write is an art of difficult attainment. In the first place, a child must be taught ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... evolved, namely, to consolidate Osmanli supremacy by the weakening of its subject peoples, the Ottoman Government has been waiting for its opportunity to get rid of the 'Arab menace.' As we have seen, they began by substituting Turkish for Arabic as a written language in all official usages from the printing of the Koran and the prayers for the Sultan down to the legends on railway tickets. The Arab spirit, according to one of the spokesmen of the New Turk party, had to be suppressed, the Arab lands had to become ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... Chinese, it will be found convenient to distinguish, broadly, the spoken from the written language and to deal with each separately. This is a distinction which would be out of place if we had to do with any European, or indeed most Oriental languages. Writing, in its origin, is merely a symbolic representation of speech. But in Chinese, as we shall see, for reasons connected with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... and guess. Even the brightest girls showed a woeful ignorance of the "three R's." In only one thing did I find them universally well taught, and that was in handwriting. However badly spelled and ungrammatical their written language might be, it was invariably neatly and legibly—often beautifully—executed. But if these girls, these workmates of mine, learned to write clear and beautiful hands, why were they not able also to learn how to spell, why were they not able to learn the principles ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... nothing from which more real enjoyment can be derived than the art of letter-writing. All praise to the inventive genius that gave to man a written language, and with it the implements with which to talk across the world! Did you ever think, reader, what a world this would be without pen, ink, and paper? Then, the absence of friends were painful, and, as we grasped the friendly hand, bade our acquaintances "good-by," and saw the last, far-distant ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... through the brushwood and looked down. She shivered a little. From here they could see beneath the bows of the rocket-ship. And there was a name there, in the Cyrillic alphabet which was the official written language of the Com-Pubs. Here, on United Nations soil, it was insolent. It boasted that the red ship came, not from an alien planet, but from a nation more alien still to all the United Nations stood for. The Com-Pubs—the Union of Communist Republics—were ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... a weeping-ash, nailed-up rose trees, and twisting creepers. After I had made a habit, till it became a passion, of seeking decorative motives, strange and novel curves—in short, began to detect the transcendent alphabet or written language of beauty and mystery in every plant whatever (of which the alphabet may be found in the works of Hulme), I found in every growth of every kind, yes, in every weed, enough to fill my soul with both art and poetry; I may say specially in weeds, since in them the ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... phrases. One does not create these sentences, as in the normal state, but waits for them to produce themselves. Yet the mind is nevertheless associated therewith. The subject treated is in unison with one's ordinary ideas. The written language is one's own. If one is deficient in orthography, the composition will betray this fault. Moreover, the mind is so intimately connected with what is written, that if it ponders something else, if the thoughts are allowed to wander from the immediate ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... was suspended; and we are now in danger of experiencing a similar evil through the superficial extension of the same culture. So many persons without any thing deserving the name of education have become writers by profession, that written language may almost be said to be principally wielded by persons ignorant of the proper use of the instrument, and who are spoiling it more and more for those who understand it. Vulgarisms, which creep in nobody knows how, are daily depriving the English language of valuable modes ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of mankind crept out of the caves, and came back to reoccupy the houses of the slain millions, we read of the delight with which they found in the grass "the golden tablets" of the Asas—additional proof that they worked in the metals, and possessed some kind of a written language; they also had "the runes," ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... his special business to call a meeting, and it was also his province to send notice to the other heads of families, on the arrival of a party of strangers, and to say what each was to provide towards entertaining hospitably the village guests. Having no written language, of course they had no written laws; still, as far back as we can trace, they had well understood laws for the prevention of theft, adultery, assault, and murder, together with many other minor things, such as disrespectful language to a chief, calling him a pig, for instance, rude behaviour ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... it seemed to the professor that this was a sign-language, and that each word was represented by a distinct sign; further examination convinced him that it was a written language, and that every letter of its alphabet was represented by a character of its own; and finally he decided that it was a language which conveyed itself partly by letters, and partly by signs or hieroglyphics. This conclusion was forced ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... interior, all the islanders are at least partly civilized. The natives who live in the coast regions are intelligent and industrious. Paganism and corrupted Muhammadanism are the prevailing religions, but Christianity has secured a firm hold in a few places. A written language and literature have ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... therefore not improbable that the principle of forming a written language by means of characters representing the sounds of which the words of the spoken language are composed, was of Egyptian origin; and that it was carried in very early times to the countries on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... named Wolsey, who devised an alphabet for their use. The alphabet is still used by them, and they keep their memoranda on dressed skins. With the exception of the Cherokees, they are, perhaps, the only tribe possessing a written language. They have no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... by the most ancient tablets of Egypt and Assyria. After spoken language was developed, and after the rude representation of ideas by visible marks drawn to resemble them had long been practised, some Cadmus must have invented an alphabet. When the use of written language was thus introduced, the word of command ceased to be confined to the range of the human voice, and it became possible for master minds to extend their influence as far as a written message could be carried. Then were communities ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... with the deep impression which it had made upon their constitution and customs. While the nobles and citizens of Thebes were adopting the imported worship of Baal and Astarte, and were introducing into the spoken and written language words borrowed from Semitic speech, the Syrians, on the other hand, were not unreceptive of the influence of their conquerors. They had applied themselves zealously to the study of Egyptian arts, industry and religion, and had borrowed from these as much, at least, as they had ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... noteworthy estimate of Bolingbroke's character made in our day comes from the pen of Mr. John Morley,[59] who describes as follows his position as a man of letters. 'He handled the great and difficult instrument of written language with such freedom and copiousness, such vivacity and ease, that in spite of much literary foppery and falsetto, he ranks in all that musicians call execution, only below the three or four highest masters of English prose. Yet of all the characters in our history Bolingbroke must be pronounced ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis |
