"Vowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I owe some apology for implying that all his vowel pronunciations are unfashionable. They are very far from being so. As far as my social experience goes (and I have kept very mixed company) there is no class in English society in which a good deal of Drinkwater pronunciation does not pass ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... it abounds with vowels, and we easily learnt to pronounce it: But found it exceedingly difficult to teach them to pronounce a single word of ours; probably not only from its abounding in consonants, but from some peculiarity in its structure; for Spanish and Italian words, if ending in a vowel, they pronounced with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... names called aloud, 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 ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... sequences that are phonetically identical to the forms above them, but which are transcribed differently to reflect morphological considerations; e.g., the form ague from the stem ague. The phonetic values of /au/, /uu/, and /ou/ are [[IPA: Open-mid back rounded vowel]:], [u:], and [o:]. ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... The object of employing ss is to fix attention on the peculiar vowel-sound u ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... giving at the same time the same sound to the vowel, u, as it obtains when occurring in the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... A. Letter U, the first letter in umbrella, &c. Q. Is letter U a vowel or consonant? A. A vowel. Q. What is the use of the umbrella? A. To keep the rain off any body. Q. What are umbrellas made of? A. Some of silk and some of cotton. Q. Which are the best? A. Those that are made of silk. Q. Is there any thing else in an umbrella? A. Yes; whalebone. Q. Where does whalebone ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... 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 to see if I was following. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... of 'leap,' which has two preterite-forms, both employed by Shelley (See for an example of the longer form, the "Hymn to Mercury", 18 5, where 'leaped' rhymes with 'heaped' (line 1). The shorter form, rhyming to 'wept,' 'adapt,' etc., occurs more frequently.)—one with the long vowel of the present-form, the other with a vowel-change (Of course, wherever this vowel-shortening takes place, whether indicated by a corresponding change in the spelling or not, "t", not "ed" is properly used—'cleave,' 'cleft,'; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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], ...
— Silver Links • Various
... power, is always represented by the Italic letter e. It has also a third power, as in the words Yes, Yell, etc., which is retained every where in the Vocabulary, at least in the beginning of words, or when it goes before another vowel, unless directed to be sounded separately by a mark over ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... construction, and well calculated for the expression of poetry. It boasts many dialects, like the Italian, of superior softness, and, like the Italian, it is derived from many sources, refining all to the most liquid sounds by the addition of a final vowel. I fully concur with Mr. Marsden in his opinion that the Malayan tongue, though derived from the Sanscrit, the Arabic, the Hindoostani, &c., &c., is based on the language which he calls the Polynesian; a language which may be considered original (as far as we know), ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... foot, 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) of the greater part of the world, are equally ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... us for the asperity and discordance of our speech, and in general, this reproach is just, for there are many persons who do scanty justice to the vowel-elements of our language. Although these elements constitute its music they are continually mistreated. We flirt with and pirouette around them constantly. If it were not so, English would be found full of beauty ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... 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
... the first vowel short. I set my teeth and was silent. He looked at me with a keen glance, as if he would read my very soul, murmuring under his breath, "if she will stand that, she will stand anything," and we parted! Once alone, I gave vent to my feelings in a burst of passionate weeping. "Ad finem!" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... (falling as the waves fall on sickle-curved beaches; the foam-flowers dropping as the grass-flowers drop,—with sharp semivowel consonantal sounds,—frsh,—for that is the way the sea talks, and leaves all pure vowel-sounds for the winds to breathe over it, and all mutes to the unyielding earth,)—about this time of over-ripe midsummer, the life of Elsie seemed fullest of its malign and restless instincts. This was the period of the year when the Rockland people were most cautious of wandering in the leafier ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... [Footnote 2: "The vowel is far more distinctive of the two names than the difference of c and t, letters which were continually interchanged."—Ibid. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... Rhodian? Form and face, Victory's self upsoaring to receive The poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name, Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants, Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... this goal was reached without many mistakes which were sometimes very disheartening, and sometimes very funny; as you will think when I tell you for the letter H a tick is sometimes used; and one girl slanting this tick the wrong way wrote, "Pale, thou poly king"; and another, who misplaced a vowel, wrote, "I like my live eel boy." However, these errors only tended to make them more careful, and when they started the speeding course, it served them ...
— Silver Links • Various
... method of another, but to seek out her own peculiar, strange processes. Thus, for example, she—like many children, however,—learned writing before reading. Not she herself, meek and yielding by nature, but some peculiar quality of her mind, obstinately refused in reading to harness a vowel alongside of a consonant, or vice versa; in writing, however, she would manage this. For penmanship along slanted rulings she, despite the general wont of beginners, felt a great inclination; she wrote bending low over the paper; blew on ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... nothing more—pure and simple records of the life of the people around him, their loves and griefs, their hopes and disappointments. The most usual metre is the simple Spanish asonante, or eight-syllable trochaic verse, with the vowel rhyme called asonante.[2] They are pervaded by a tender spirit of melancholy, very different from the Weltschmerz of Heine, with some of whose lyrics the Spanish poet's cantares may be compared without losing anything by the comparison. In one poem he says: "In the depths of my ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... investigation, the senses being delicate organs and shy in company. Let the minute matters of form and structure be gone over at home. Let the student work out the metre, the typical line, and the variations by which the poet gets his effects, the metaphors, the alliterations, the consonant and vowel harmonies. It will aid if this work be made as definite and as exact as an investigation in a scientific laboratory. But all this should be the student's home work. In the class the large divisions of the poem should ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... regret, and longing; and it 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
... attempt to introduce a mispronunciation of the word humble should be resisted by every one who has learned the plain and simple rule of grammar, that "a becomes an before a vowel or a silent h." That the rule obtained a considerable time ago, we have only to look into the Book of Common Prayer to prove, where the congregation are exhorted to come "with an humble, lowly, penitent, and obedient heart," and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... old hat and the 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 ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... hare. An was formerly used before words beginning with h, even when that letter was sounded, and also before words beginning with a vowel. ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... had thrown a greater burden on the Scriptures. The Scriptures became the Word of God, verbally and literally true; in its extreme form this doctrine reverted almost to the ancient Rabbinical maxim that even the vowel points and accents were of divine origin. In practice, if not in theory, the halo was extended to cover even the marginal chronology, then a familiar feature in the editions of the English Bible. The present ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... [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
... one vowel?" demanded Bell, laughing. "I refuse to be fettered. Wait a second!—now I ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... doubling of the vowel when long, as in modern Dutch; thus, vootum votum; aara āra. This method was persistently used by the ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... then recedes; and how the crest is always some 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
... 3. The vowel-letters had nearly the same values as in Old English. Long vowels were often marked by (´). In this book long vowels are regularly marked by (¯)[1]. The following are the elementary vowels and diphthongs, ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... vowel A is formed by opening the mouth widely: A. Its vowels are to be given the sounds ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... settlement of tradition went another task, that of fixing the letters of the consonantal text of the Bible (by the Massora), its vowel pronunciation (by the punctuation), and its translation into the Aramaic vernacular (Targum). Here also the Babylonians came after the Palestinians, yet of this sort of erudition Palestine continued to be the headquarters even ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... 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 ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... the vowel i by bringing the jaws still closer to one another, and stretching the two corners of the mouth towards the ears; ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... of my friend Lloyd's place," he said, "but you'll find it written there in seven consonants and one vowel." ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... fully expressed are "unpacked" and shown within braces, top to bottom. Examples: {e} vowel with dieresis (looks like umlaut symbol) German umlaut is written out: ae, ue, oe French accents are omitted {ae} {oe} ae, oe ligatures {'e} vowel with accent {)e} vowel with breve (short-vowel sign) {th} {dh} thorn, ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... about the 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 ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... seen that the ten names contain eight but only eight different vowels, 0 and 4 having the same vowel aw, while 5 and 9 have ai. Both these pairs caused confusion; the first of them was cured by substituting the name of the letter O for the name of the zero cipher, which happens to be identical with it in form,[9] and this introduced a ninth vowel sound ou ( owe), but the other pair remained ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... used -p where the Roman used -q, as -pis- for -quis-; just as languages otherwise closely related are found to differ; for instance, -p is peculiar to the Celtic in Brittany and Wales, -k to the Gaelic and Erse. Among the vowel sounds the diphthongs in Latin, and in the northern dialects generally, appear very much destroyed, whereas in the southern Italian dialects they have suffered little; and connected with this is the fact, that in composition ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of animate nouns is usually formed by adding the syllable "wog" to the singular; if the word ends in a vowel, only the letter "g" is added; and sometimes the syllables "yog," ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... was, was arranging the language, you would have thought that, if they had had a spark of pity in their systems, they would have tacked on to that emotion of thoughts of which the young man's fancy lightly turns in spring, some word ending in an open vowel. They must have known that lyricists would want to use whatever word they selected as a label for the above-mentioned emotion far more frequently than any other word in the language. It wasn't much to ask of them to choose a word capable of numerous ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... notes (a volume seldom met with now) the learned William Davis records that Louis Elzevir was the first who observed the distinction between the v consonant and the u vowel, which distinction, however, had been recommended long before by Ramus and other writers, but had never been regarded. There were five of these Elzevirs, viz.: Louis, Bonaventure, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... 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 by keys ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... further 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
... 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, and discusses the ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Bodo 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 ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... alphabet, according to the native idea, consists of only twenty consonants. But as a matter of fact, each of these consonants is credited with an inherent vowel sound of a (often written o) as in water; and there are five vowel signs which are attached to the consonants, and so vary the inherent a. There are also twenty auxiliary consonant forms, corresponding to the original twenty consonants, ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... when it was not preoccupied by woodpeckers, and a printer's devil had once seen a nest-building blue jay enter the composing window, flutter before one of the slanting type-cases with an air of deliberate selection, and then fly off with a vowel ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 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, ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... perceived, it is not difficult to shift from the number of pats to the number of times he hears a noise. This once accomplished, tests can be made with sounds of different kinds, different pitch, and different volume, varying the distance, the instruments, and the vowel when the articulate sounds are reached. He can be shown a whistle, then, when it is blown behind his back, he will hold up as many fingers as the times it was blown, if he perceives the sound. He can be asked to distinguish between a whistle, a little ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... have strangely neglected it) to my mind stands the first, or almost the first, secret of beautiful writing in English, whether in prose or in verse; I mean that inter-play of vowel-sounds in which no language can match us. We have so many vowel sounds indeed, and so few vowels to express them, that the foreigner, mistaking our modesty, complains against God's plenty. We alone, for example, sound by a natural vowel that noble I, which other nations can only compass by ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... English. He said Bruno was a terrible 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, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... consists of vowelless words. The correct vowels must be ascertained before the meaning of a word or sentence can be definitely established. The vowel points of our Hebrew Bibles are not older than the seventh century A.D., and are frequently erroneous. In the present case the word stealing does not occur in the text, but only ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... please also to observe that there is not, to the best of my remembrance, one vowel gaping on another for want of a caesura in this whole poem. But where a vowel ends a word the next begins either with a consonant or what is its equivalent; for our w and h aspirate, and our diphthongs, are plainly such. The greatest latitude I take is in the letter y ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... they preserve it after having past the age of Puberty. Whoever would be curious to discover the feigned Voice of one who has the Art to disguise it, let him take Notice, that the Artist sounds the Vowel i, or e, with more Strength and less Fatigue than the Vowel ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... example of the attendant gracioso, half servant, half 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... not 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... the Latin consonantal i. 4. The s between vowels was pronounced like our s. 5. The combinations [ae], [oe] were no longer pronounced as diphthongs, but like the simple e. 6. The ancient vowel-quantities were preserved only in the penultima of polysyllables (where they determined the stress); in all other positions the original system of quantities had given place to a new system based mainly on rhythm. Of this system in detail we have little certain knowledge; but one ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... 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 of trouble to express or to match the particular ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... their speech used universally. The language was shorn of a number of grammatical peculiarities, the distinctive forms for the subjunctive mood for example and most of its irregular plurals were abolished; its spelling was systematised and adapted to the vowel sounds in use upon the continent of Europe, and a process of incorporating foreign nouns and verbs commenced that speedily reached enormous proportions. Within ten years from the establishment of the World Republic the New English Dictionary had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000 ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... are so fluctuating 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 two ideas ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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, teeth, lips, ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... 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 ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... [219] The 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
... larynx is free it will not and should not be in the same position at all times. It will be a little lower for somber tones than for bright tones. It will be a little higher for the vowel e than for oo or o, but the adjustments will be automatic, never conscious. It cannot be too often reiterated that every part of the vocal mechanism must act automatically, and it is not properly controlled ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... in such a way derived as to have lost the regularity and stateliness of its ancient original, without having compensated itself with any richness and sweetness of sound peculiarly its own; like, for instance, that canorous vowel quality of its sister derivative, the Italian. The French language, in short, is far from being an ideal ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... but an older and contracted form of the common Sanskrit word evam ("thus"), which, coming from the pronominal base "a," in some derivations changed to "e," may have at one time occurred in the form avam, when, by the elision of the vowel following a, for which there are numerous analogies in Sanskrit, vum would become aum, and hence, according to the ordinary phonetic laws of the language, Om. This etymology of the word, however, seems to have ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... years to the subject, having the body of Susanna Crum before my eyes every minute of the time for inspiration, Susanna Crum is what I should have named that maid. Not a vowel could be added, not a consonant omitted. I said so when first I saw her, and weeks of intimate acquaintance only deepened my reverence for the parental genius that had so described her to ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... letter; character; hieroglyphic &c. (writing) 590; type &c. (printing) 591; capitals; digraph, trigraph; ideogram, ideograph; majuscule, minuscule; majuscule, minuscule; alphabet, ABC[obs3], abecedary[obs3], christcross-row. consonant, vowel; diphthong, triphthong[Gram]; mute, liquid, labial, dental, guttural. syllable; monosyllable, dissyllable[obs3], polysyllable; affix, suffix. spelling, orthograph[obs3]; phonography[obs3], phonetic spelling; anagrammatism[obs3], metagrammatism[obs3]. cipher, monogram, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... 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 ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Those ending in f change that letter to v and then add es; as, half, halves; leaf, leaves; wolf, wolves. Those ending in y change that to i and add the es; as, cherry, cherries; berry, berries; except when the y is preceded by a vowel, in which case it only adds the s; as, day, days; money, moneys (not ies); attorney, attorneys. All this is to make the sound more easy and harmonious. F and v were formerly used indiscriminately, in singulars as well as plurals, and, in ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... by the irons would not be the toe, but the ankle. A writer in 'Truth' has cleared up the word (see quotation). It is of Maori origin. Away from Maoriland "toe-rigger" had no meaning, and a false meaning and origin were given by the change of vowel. ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... 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 in ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... thoughts move in such 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)
... used in expressing lively description, haste, fear, command, etc., and consists of an abrupt and forcible utterance, usually more or less explosive, and falls on the first part of a sound or upon the opening of a vowel, and its use contributes much to distinct pronounciation. It is not common to give a strong, full and clear radical stress, yet this abrupt function is highly important in elocution, and when properly used in public reading or ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... made this winter (1831-32) with his Shelleyan "Sonnet to a Cloud" and his imitations of Byron's "Hebrew Melodies," from which he learnt how to concentrate expression, and to use rich vowel-sounds and liquid consonants with rolling effect. A deeper and more serious turn of thought, that gradually usurped the place of the first boyish effervescence, has been traced by him to the influence of Byron, in whom, while others ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... their origin at that time. Swinburne has said of Coleridge: "For height and perfection of imaginative quality he is the greatest of lyric poets, this was his special power and is his special praise." Much of the charm and magnetic suggestion of his famous poem "Christabel" rests on its exquisite vowel-music. The same is true of his wonderful "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." There the running prose glossary accompanying the poem displays the same delicate, fanciful tone as his most musical verse. By these two poems alone ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... O, and U in irregular repetition. On 4 cards, one of these vowels appears 21 times and each of the three others 9 times; on 8 cards, one appears 18 times and every one of the three others 10 times; on 8 cards, one appears 15 times and each of the others 11 times; and finally, on 4 cards one vowel appears 16 times, each of the three others 8 times, and besides them 8 different consonants are mixed in. The person to be tested has to distribute these 24 cards as quickly as possible in 4 piles, in such a way that in the first pile are placed all ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... 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 ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... painful vigilance is needed for the avoidance of the unfit or untuneful phrase, how the meaning must be tossed from expression to expression, mutilated and deceived, ere it can find rest in words. The stupid accidental recurrence of a single broad vowel; the cumbrous repetition of a particle; the emphatic phrase for which no emphatic place can be found without disorganising the structure of the period; the pert intrusion on a solemn thought of a flight of short syllables, twittering like ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... (Cantemir, p. 34) and the Tata of the Greeks (Ducas, c. 35) are derived from the natural language of children; and it may be observed, that all such primitive words which denote their parents, are the simple repetition of one syllable, composed of a labial or a dental consonant and an open vowel, (Des Brosses, Mechanisme des Langues, tom. i. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... descendants were found, a dwindling community, by the Jesuit Fathers of the 17th century; and there again they were visited in 1850 by a Protestant mission, which succeeded in obtaining from them Hebrew rolls of parts of the Pentateuch in the square character, with vowel points. After this, it was generally believed that the few remaining stragglers, who seemed to be entirely ignorant of everything connected with their faith, had become merged in the ordinary population. A recent traveller, however, asserts that in 1909 he found at K'ai-feng ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... is 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 sound of i; the consonant ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... hence they looked about for some system which could be readily grasped by these ignorant people. It was necessary that the system be absolutely phonetic and understood easily. By adapting the system used in shorthand, of putting the vowel marks in different positions by the side of the consonant signs, Mr. Pollard and his assistant found that they could solve their problem. The signs for the consonants are larger than the vowel signs, and the position of the latter by ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... and nation, of the past and present, of the inward and outward, of the subject and object, of the notional and relational, of the root or unchanging part of the word and of the changing inflexion, if such a distinction be admitted, of the vowel and the consonant, of quantity and accent, of speech and writing, of poetry and prose. We observe also the reciprocal influence of sounds and conceptions on each other, like the connexion of body and mind; and further remark that although the names of objects were originally ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... 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 learned as ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... get all that 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
... 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 ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... could not 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) ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... corollary, the refrain forming the close 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 as ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... | (pipe) precedes the following symbols: ''/^ to mark accents in Greek. These in turn Precede the vowel they refer to. ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... 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
... 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. ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... accented syllables, while 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
... 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 nationality whose language and customs they adopt.... ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... prove a matter of fact, as capable of exact scientific demonstration as any other, that the Consonant and Vowel Elements of Oral Language are, in a radical and important sense, repetitory of, or correspondential with, Musical Tones or the Elements of Music, as well as with Chemical Elements, and these again with the Elements ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... patience, I would almost say that they are more suitable than the Latin alphabet. The ancient Egyptian had our vowels; our o, which is only final and is not like that of the Spanish, which is a vowel between o and u. Like us, the Egyptians lacked the true sound of e, and in their language are found our ha and kha, which we do not have in the Latin alphabet such as is used in Spanish. For example, in this word mukha," he went on, pointing to the book, "I transcribe ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... word whatever except these two verbs. There were the words noti, and navi, and nari, and when in was forced to be prefixed to them, it seemed more musical to say ignoti, ignavi, ignari, than to adhere to the strict rules. Men say ex usu and republica, because in the one phrase a vowel followed the preposition, and in the other there would have been great harshness if you had not removed the consonant, as in exegit, edixit, effecit, extulit, edidit. And sometimes the preposition has sustained an alteration, regulated by the first letter ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... fail to make their words intelligible to the listener, and in the majority of cases this is due to insufficient stressing of the consonants. Vowel tones carry, while consonants do not. If we want to shout to anyone we call out "Hi" or "Hey": never by any chance do we try to reach them with a "P-p-p-p-p" or a "T-t-t-t-t," and for precisely this reason. If, therefore, a singer wishes his words to carry to the ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... i-ba come; ha vowel prolongation of the syllable ba; e-he I bid you. "I bid ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... 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
... forming sounds. Together we carried on quite a 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; but ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... The referenced 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" The cross-referenced ...
— A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - For the Use of Students • John R. Clark Hall
... indicated by the underscore character. Acute accents are indicated by a single quote (') after the vowel, while grave accents have a single quote before the vowel. All other accents ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... observe, that after several sheets of that Gospel had been printed, after the same manner as that adopted in the first edition, Mr. Lipoftsoff, the Censor, gave me notice that he had determined that the position of the vowel-points should be altered; and I did not think proper to make any opposition. But as common-sense informed me that it was by no means expedient to exhibit two systems of pointing in the same work, I subsequently ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... our shorthand. Although there were three characters to represent the vowels when used alone, whenever a consonant would be pronounced with "a," only the sign of the consonant was used. In order to express a final consonant, or one without the vowel, a tiny cross was made below the character. If "e" was wanted, a dot would be placed over the letter that expressed the consonant, or if the vowel was to be "u," ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... slightest sufferer, in this case, was 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 Ireland. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... the woman in their parlance replaced the letter 'r' by vowel sounds almost too obscure to be represented, except where it came last in a word before a word beginning with a vowel; there it was annexed to the vowel by a strong liaison, according to the custom universal in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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
... complicated rhymed stanza from the limited resources of his native language. This stanza, with alternate and repeatedly recurring rhymes, is borrowed from the Italians. It is peculiarly fitted to their language, which abounds in similar vowel terminations, and is as little adapted to ours, from the stubborn, unaccommodating resistance which the consonant endings of the northern languages make to this sort of endless sing-song.—Not that I would, on that account, part with the stanza ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 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 as ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... warmed, a word traveled down the breeze that made the four ruffians start and turn red with surprise, and the next moment darken with anger and apprehension. The word came again and again; they all heard it—its open vowel gave it a sonorous ring; it seemed to fly farther than any other word the speaker uttered, or perhaps when he came to it he spoke it louder than smaller words, or the hearers' ears ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... rules governing punctuation are now generally adopted, there are a few cases where printers and proof-readers disagree. In the division of a word at the end of a line, the English prefer to divide on the vowel, as in ha-bit, pre-face, pro-phet; the American, on the consonant, as hab-it, pref-ace, proph-et. The former division shows the origin of the word; the latter, its pronunciation. Of the two, I prefer the English style; for instance, in the word ...
— The Importance of the Proof-reader - A Paper read before the Club of Odd Volumes, in Boston, by John Wilson • John Wilson
... 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. C.H. Towne, ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... indeed, to illustrate a complete dissertation on the methods of expression in serious poetry from the fifty-one lines of the Dies Irae. Rhyme, alliteration, cadence, and adjustment of vowel and consonant values,—all these things receive perfect expression in it, or, at least, in the first thirteen stanzas, for the last four are a little inferior. It is quite astonishing to reflect upon the careful art or the felicitous accident of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of excellent parts, and a pupil who does us great credit. It is true, as your sublime highness's discrimination has observed, that his enunciation, even to those who know the language, may have some appearance of indistinctness, because he is defective in the vowel-points; but we cannot help it, for all our books are unpointed. In this, which, indeed, we consider a matter of little importance, we do not pretend to compete with the Jews, who teach theirs from pointed books. If your sublime highness ever heard a bear read ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... almost every sentence; of which I know not the use, only that it is a refinement, and very frequently practised. Then you will observe the abbreviations and elisions, by which consonants of most obdurate sound are joined together, without one softening vowel to intervene; and all this only to make one syllable of two, directly contrary to the example of the Greeks and Romans; altogether of the Gothic strain, and a natural tendency towards relapsing into barbarity, which delights in monosyllables, and uniting ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... after 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 ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... The first of his translations was published in 1853, the last twenty years later. They consist[4] of fifteen complete plays, which I believe to be the largest amount of translated verse by any one author, that has ever appeared in English. Most of it is in the difficult assonant or vowel rhyme, hardly ever previously attempted in our language. This may be a fitting place to cite a few testimonies as to the execution of the work. Longfellow, whom I have myself heard speak of the "Autos" in a way that showed how deeply he had studied ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... until the language of tone and gesture became gradually raised to the level of imperfect pantomime, as in children before they begin to use words. At this stage, however, or even before it, I think very probably vowel sounds must have been employed in tone language, if not also a few consonants. Eventually the action and reaction of receptual intelligence and conventional sign-making must have ended in so far developing the former as to have admitted of the breaking up (or articulation) of vocal sounds, ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... origin a hieroglyphic system, each word having its own graphic representative. Nor would it have been possible to write Chinese in any other way. Chinese is a monosyllabic language. No word is allowed more than one consonant and one vowel,—the vowels including diphthongs and nasal vowels. Hence the possible number of words is extremely small, and the number of significative sounds in the Chinese language is said to be no more than 450. No language, however, could be satisfied with so ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the stream of sound, notwithstanding its division into syllables by the organs of articulation—lips, tongue, etc.—should pour forth smoothly and uninterruptedly. The full value of each tone must be allotted to the vowel; the consonants which precede or end the syllables are pronounced quickly and distinctly. In declamatory singing, on the contrary, the consonants should be articulated with greater deliberation ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... be read aloud. Rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, vowel coloring, the effect of enjambement, to name only the more obvious phenomena, appeal solely to the ear. Looking at a page of verse is like looking at a page of music. Unless the symbols are translated into sound values, the effect is blank. A skilled musician is able ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... for users whose text readers cannot use the "real" (Unicode/UTF-8) version. In the Latin text, the "oe" diphthong is shown as [oe] to distinguish it from the two-vowel sequence "oe" ("coeuntia"). The asterism used in the advertising section is shown ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... plain shimmered and glowed until they felt as if they were riding over a cooling sheet of molten metal. Their lips were parched and dried, and their tongues like tags of leather. They lisped curiously in their speech, for it was only the vowel sounds which would come without an effort. Miss Adams's chin had dropped upon her chest, and her great hat concealed ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... the intellect and the heart whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch or not, and if so, whether he was as accomplished a geologist as Professors Buckland and Lyell? Admit that the whole letter of Scripture comes from God, even to the vowel-points, by what laws and methods shall we expound it so as to put an end to the internecine war between Faith and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... butterflies were gone, were laboriously ardent. Many thoughts that occupied the later years of my friend were caught from the small utterance of that toy. Thence came his inquiries into the roots of articulate language and the foundations of literary art; his papers on vowel-sounds, his papers in the Saturday Review upon the laws of verse, and many a strange approximation, many a just note, thrown out in talk and now forgotten. I pass over dozens of his interests, and dwell on this trifling ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the fresh young voices 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 ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... 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 by phonetic value. A few sequences such ...
— A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - From A.D. 1150 To 1580 • A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat
... aforesaid economical and nondescript fashion, came the trials of "planting time." This was such an unfragrant and expensive period that I pass over it as briefly as possible. I saw it was necessary in conformity with the appalling situation to alter one vowel in my Manorial Hall. The haul altogether amounted to eighteen loads besides a hundred bags of vilely smelling fertilizers. Agents for every kind of phosphates crowded around me, descanting on the needs of the old land, until I began to comprehend what the owner meant ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... globe, each writing in the language of his adopted land. The stay-at-home in Frankfort was to write Jew-German, for which purpose some Hebrew must be acquired. His father sent him to Rector Albrecht. The rector was always found with one book open before him—a well-thumbed Lucian. But the Hebrew vowel-points were perplexing, and the boy found better amusement in putting shrewd questions on what struck him as impossibilities or inconsistencies in the Old-Testament narrative they were reading. The old gentleman was infinitely amused, had fits of mingled coughing and laughter, but ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Anglicise it, and, strange to say, I actually found that there was a rule in the English language without an exception. It was this: Words formed from Greek disyllables in os, whether the penultimate vowel be long or short, are monosyllables made long by e final. Thus, not only does bolos make bole, but polos pole, poros pore, skopos scope, tonos tone, &c.; so also gyros, gyre; thymos, thyme; stylos, style; kybos, cube, &c.: I therefore, without ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... of age, he had read nothing but novels and poetry and romantic tales of Scottish heroes. Then he left home to become a teacher of elocution in various British schools, and by the time he was of age he had made several slight discoveries as to the nature of vowel-sounds. Shortly afterwards, he met in London two distinguished men, Alexander J. Ellis and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who did far more than they ever knew to forward Bell in the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... 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 noises) ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... on this instrument every sound struck on the keys represents a certain vowel-consonant sound. Thus the listener hears the sounds more distinctly than we hear the words of ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... out the ten letters which are to be used in the telegram, it is well to avoid the unusual consonants and to have a vowel here and there. ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher |
