"Vowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as the words.[Footnote: "The peculiarly liquid quality of Polynesian phonetics is impossible for foreigners to acquire. Europeans who attempt a mastery of these sounds invariably suffer from what etymologists call metabelia, or vowel complaint."—Prof. ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... 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, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to single words, as Dialysis or Diaeresis, placed over vowels to shew they must be pronounced in distinct syllables, as Raphael. The Circumflex is set over a vowel to carry a long sound, as Euphrates. An Accent is marked thus (a), to shew where the emphasis must be placed, as neglect; or to shew that the consonant following must be pronounced double, as homage. To these may be added the long (-) and short ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... as K is also T, and L is also R. The most northern island of the group, Kauai, is as often pronounced as if it began with a T, and Kalo is usually Taro. It is a very musical language. Each syllable and word ends with a vowel, and there are none of our rasping and sibilant consonants. In their soft phraseology our hard rough surnames undergo a metamorphosis, as Fisk into Filikina, Wilson into Wilikina. Each vowel is distinctly pronounced, and usually with the Italian sound. The ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... form is perhaps the prettier. I am sorry to say that the poet, to get a rhyme, sometimes spells it "Urracle," which is not pretty. Southey's "Queen Orraca" seems to me to have changed her vowel to disadvantage. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... connexion with other facts, according to endless diversities of permutation and combination, furnish grounds for such eternal successions of new speculations as make the facts themselves virtually new. The same Hebrew words are read by different sets of vowel points, and the same hieroglyphics are deciphered by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... enclosed in pluses represent boldface; Vowels followed by a colon represent a long vowel (printed with a macron in ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... story one has to slur over the pronunciation of "Paradise," making the last vowel short, so as to explain the misunderstanding about "Paris." I have retained the Paris motif as all through the Middle Ages, wayfarers from and to Paris (wandering scholars or clerics) would be familiar sights to the peasantry ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... PROF. PHIL. And the vowel i by bringing the jaws still closer to one another, and stretching the two corners of the mouth towards the ears; ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... 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 ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... breathlessly, his pulses beating with unwonted rapidity, . . what.. WHAT was it that Sah-luma sang? ... A Love-song! in those caressing vowel-sounds which composed the language of Al-Kyris, . . a love-song, burning as strong wine, tender as the murmur of the sea on mellow, moon-entranced evenings,—an arrowy shaft of rhyme tipped with fire and meant to ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... had devoted 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 ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... free and uninterrupted sound of the voice. The vowel sounds are formed by the voice modified, but not interrupted, by the various positions of ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... press; and this long-ears had to be 'dear Sir'd and obedient servanted' till I said (to use a mild word) 'commend me to the sincerities of this kind of thing.'! When I spoke of you knowing little of me, one of the senses in which I meant so was this—that I would not well vowel-point my common-place letters and syllables with a masoretic other sound and sense, make my 'dear' something intenser than 'dears' in ordinary, and 'yours ever' a thought more significant than the run of its like. And all this came of your talking ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... precedes the following symbols: ''/^ to mark accents in Greek. These in turn Precede the vowel they refer to. ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... 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, which are used in all combinations ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... 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 be sympathetically shown, so ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... transliterated using the English equivalents of the Greek; the Greek eta is transliterated as e and omega as o. Diacritic marks are omitted with the exception of the initial hard breathing mark which is indicated by an "h" before the initial vowel of the word. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon visions ranging between the extremes of man's experience. Spelled with an "e" it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams; with an "a" ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... pronunciation of which is obscure. (2) The consonant 'ain, to which the untrained European ear is deaf, and which in consequence is often omitted. Less frequently it may be over-conscientiously inserted in a place where it does not exist. Sometimes the 'ain and its associated vowel are transposed (as M'alula for Ma'lula) making unpronounceable combinations of consonants. (3) The letter kaf, often dropped in pronunciation, and therefore often omitted. (4) The letter ghain, ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... to traditional use (see Wordsworth's sonnet, "Near the Lake of Thrasymene;" and Rogers's Italy, see note, p. 378), sounds the final vowel in Thrasym[e]ne. The Greek, Latin, and Italian equivalents bear him out; but, most probably, he gave Thrasymene and himself an extra syllable "vel metri ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... work to do, and soon went; and very nearly up to Hall time Williams was engaged in a vain attempt to identify the subject of his picture. 'If the vowel before the ng had only been left, it would have been easy enough,' he thought; 'but as it is, the name may be anything from Guestingley to Langley, and there are many more names ending like this than I thought; and this rotten book has ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... the syllable -lyche form the comparative in -loker and the superlative in -lokest; as, positive uglyche ( ugly), comp. ugloker, superl. uglokest. The long vowel of the positive is often shortened in the comp. and superl., as in the modern ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... Chaldeans and the causes of their ruin Other legends of a confusion of tongues Influence upon Christendom of the Hebrew legends Lucretius's theory of the origin of language The teachings of the Church fathers on this subject The controversy as to the divine origin of the Hebrew vowel points Attitude of the reformers toward this question Of Catholic scholars.—Marini Capellus and his adversaries ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... which appears frequently in the native names, is used to indicate a sound between the obscure vowel e, as in sun, and the ur, ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... anthropologist. We are informed that the Bantu languages "constitute a very distinct type of speech which, as contrasted with others amongst the group of Negro tongues, is remarkable as a rule for Italian melodiousness, simplicity and frequency of its vowel sounds, and the comparative ease with which its exemplars can be acquired and spoken by Europeans" (p. 15). "This one Negro language family now covers the whole of the southern third of Africa, with ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... his arms slightly, he was still so tangled that he could do nothing except await whatever fate was in store for him. Two persons came into the room; he heard them speak sharply and knew then that they were Chinese; there was no mistaking the outlandish inflection of vowel and consonant. In a second rough hands were laid upon him and he was dragged away from the wall. He gave a few last futile wrenches and then lay still, ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... shape, number, and use of the characters and letters of this nation it is quite evident that they are all taken from the Moro Malays and originated from the Arabs. The vowel letters are only three in number, but they serve for five in their use; for the second and third are indifferently e, i, y, o, and u, according as is required by the meaning or sense of the word which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... 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 rural ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... how, a hill (Chapter XII), or the genitive of How, one of the numerous medieval forms of Hugh (Chapter VI). Hind may be for Hine, a farm servant (Chapter III), or for Mid. Eng. hende, courteous (cf. for the vowel change Ind, Chapter XIII), and is perhaps sometimes also an animal nickname (Beasts, Chapter XXIII). Rouse is generally Fr. roux, i.e. the red, but it may also be the nominative form of Rou, i.e. of Rolf, or Rollo, the sea-king who conquered Normandy. [Footnote: Old French had a declension ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... House to say no. He might go so far as to utter the first letter of that indispensable monosyllable; but before he accomplished the vowel, his mind would turn to some happy "formula" passing midway between no and yes. He was fertile in these expedients. Daily he would talk of some new "formula," for Fiume, for Dantzig, for the Saar Valley, for the occupation of the Rhine, for Shantung, always ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... 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]:], ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... of consonants, the vowel sounds having always been inserted orally, and never marked in writing until the "vowel points," as they are called, were invented by the Masorites, some six centuries after the Christian era. As the vowel ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... 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
... seating herself and letting her fingers run over the keys, "can't you substitute another word for 'muffled' in the third line? It comes on a high note—upper g—and I want a long, not a short vowel sound." ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... elsewhere). 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" ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... received in Esperanto, concluding with a question of general interest regarding the sound of "Scii." This word, represented phonetically, does present some difficulty. S-ts-ee-ee is not easy to pronounce. In practice one should elide the first "s" on to the vowel immediately preceding. Thus mi ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 3 • Various
... was to be marked not by a printer's sign, but by the falling cadence of the rhythm itself. Furthermore, great care should be taken to avoid hiatus between words, as when the first word ends and the word following begins with a vowel. But the glory of style to the classical rhetorician lay in its use of figures. Here rhetoric vindicated its practicality by a preoccupation with the impractical; and here, as in analysis, rhetoric ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... in two forms, Latin-1 and ASCII-7. The only differences are in the way fractions are displayed (as a single character, or as "number/number") and the first vowel in "Caesar" (one letter ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... printed as vowels with a line over them, were used in the original to indicate a vowel followed by an 'm' or 'n'. They have been expanded as follows (the contraction is marked ...
— A Declaration of the Causes, which mooved the chiefe Commanders of the Nauie of her most excellent Maiestie the Queene of England, in their voyage and expedition for Portingal, to take and arrest in t • Anonymous
... the reprinting of three sheets of St. Matthew, I beg leave to 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 caused the first sheets to be reprinted. ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... certain articulate sounds called vowel or vocal, from the fact that they are produced by the vocal cords, and are but slightly modified as they pass out of the mouth. The true vowels, a, e, i, o, u, can all be sounded alone, and may be prolonged ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... 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 saw nothing more than wit and passion, Ruskin perceived ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... minda (two hands and another). [Note the "v" at the end of gegedo. The full word is really gegedove; but it is shortened to gegedo, unless the next word is a vowel. Also note the "u." There are two words for "and," namely ta and une. The "u" here is the une shortened, and put instead of ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... &c[etera] q with cursive semicolon q[ue] superscript closed curve [us] long final s [e]s crossed p p[er] or p[ar] p with looped downstroke p[ro] p with macron p[re] vowel with macron vowel[m] or vowel[n] consonant with supralinear upward curve consonant[er] w with supralinear t w[i]t[h] y with superscript e y^e (i.e., the) y with superscript t y^t (i.e., that) y with macron y[at] (i.e., that) y with supralinear u ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... difficulty of drawing them, which takes time and 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 ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... 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 ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... into stanzas was of course a 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 the most ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the form of spelling I have adopted in transcribing Norse proper names. The spirants thorn and eth are represented by th and d, as being more familiar to readers unacquainted with the original. Marks of vowel-length are in all cases omitted. The inflexional -r of the nominative singular masculine is also omitted, whether it appears as -r or is assimilated to a preceding consonant (as in Odinn, Eysteinn, Heindall, Egill) in the Norse form, ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... number of Sanskrit words contained in the Basque language, specimens of some of which will be found below. It is remarkable enough, that in the greater part of the derivatives from the Sanskrit the Basque has dropped the initial consonant, so that the word commences with a vowel. The Basque, indeed, may be said to be almost a vowel language; the number of consonants employed being comparatively few: perhaps eight words out of ten commence and terminate with a vowel, owing to which it is a language to the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... 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 made little ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... never to be found as in the second, for that sound, or 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 it, as thus, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... as one opens it to pronounce the vowel a, and motioned to the child to open her mouth in the same manner. Then the mistress made her a sign to emit her voice. She did so; but instead of a, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... collective suicide of mankind, and in throwing a "bloody spittle of contempt" at life. A "bloody spittle," as is known from Arthur Rimbaud's sonnets on consonants, stands before the eyes of everyone who pronounces the vowel i, just as the vowel a brings up the picture of "black, shaggy flies, which buzz around terribly ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... of the language, before I could attach any meaning to it. They have a good deal of the Creole drawl, but it is varied by an occasional extreme rapidity of utterance, in which they seem to skip from consonant to consonant, until, lighting upon a broad, open vowel, they rest upon that to restore the balance of sound. The women carry this peculiarity of speaking to a much greater extreme than the men, who have more evenness and stateliness of utterance. A common bullock-driver, on horseback, delivering ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... or vowel[n] y with supralinear e y^e (i.e., the) accented q with semicolon q[ue] w with supralinear curve w[ith] e ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... of Gaelic broke from Duncan, into the midst of which rushed another from Mrs. Catanach, similar, but coarse in vowel and harsh in consonant sounds. The marquis stepped into the room. "What is the meaning of all this?" he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... vowel-peals throughout the passage, now shut and anon opened by the scheme of consonants; now continuous, anon modulated by delicate pauses; always chiming obediently to the strain of thought; then I hold that if we have not actual counterpoint here, we have something remarkably ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... this? 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? ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... depths of that great spirit, which shone out in all his countenance, and filled his eyes with awful inspiration, as he spoke, in a voice calm and sweet, sad and regretful, and yet terrible from the slow distinctness of every vowel and consonant? ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... 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 time near ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... fragrance. Squirrels scampered over its roof 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 in its bill. ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to arrive at the Whipple shack just about the time when Mary Hope would be starting home. He was curious to see just how much or how little she had changed; to know whether she still had that funny little Scotch accent that manifested itself in certain phrasings, certain vowel sounds at variance with good English pronunciation. He wanted to know just how much Pocatello had done to spoil her. Beneath all was the primal instinct of the young male dimly seeking the female whom his destiny had ordained to be ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... said he would not help us, unless we made a decree that they should stay as they were for ever," said Gladys. "Johnnie had stolen the letter I, and made it stand for one. So it does still, though it is a vowel. Janie has a form of our ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... is a noble word for ye," said Catherine proudly. "Our Gerard taught thee that, I'll go bail. Come then, out with thy vowel." ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... and quoted spellings (including inconsistent proper nouns), in addition to irregular hyphenation, remain as printed. The oe ligature is shown as [oe], whilst [)a] and [)i] indicate a breve over the relevant vowel. ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... utterly deficient in diphthongs.[17] They have neither the oe nor ue, which the Germans consider as the best sounds of their idiom: nor the Greek,[Greek: ei], [Greek: ui], [Greek: au], [Greek: eu], and the like; still less the variety of pronunciation of one and the same vowel, peculiar to the English. The Poles, Russians, and Bohemians, possess however a twofold i, [18] a finer and a coarser one; the latter of which is not to be found in any other European language, and is unpleasant ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... words. It was in its 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 small a vocabulary, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... 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
... a for broad a (instead of 2 dots under it). & superscripted a & o (Spanish ordinals) before o for ligatures. A long vowel should have a straight line over it but I've shown them by using a colon : after them. Short vowels are shown by a grave accent mark after instead of a curved line over the letter. An equals sign after a word shows that the next 1 should start the next column. "Special ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... who does not immediately pay his losings, is said to vowel the winner, by repeating the vowels I. O. U. or perhaps from giving his note for the money according to the Irish form, where the acknowledgment of the debt is expressed by the letters I. O. U. which, the sum and name of the debtor being added, is deemed a sufficient ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... contrivances are employed to effect them in both cases where any ruggedness in the natural collocation of the words may present itself. For instance, change in the accent, the elision or the addition of a letter or syllable, the lengthening of a vowel, transposition, and a hundred other little artifices. The euphony itself, though sometimes a little imperfect, is also studied with the same kind of care in the older and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... 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 ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... the velvety South of Ireland vowel-inflection. "We keep Wednesday for the Women's Laager, always. Many of them are so miserable, poor souls, about their husbands and sons and brothers who are in the trenches, or who have been killed, and then there are the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... have for their object the strengthening of the voice, should also be adapted to develop and perfect the process of breathing. The student should be frequently trained in set exercises in loud exclamations, pronouncing with great force the separate vowel sounds, single words, and whole sentences, and at the same time taking care to bring into vigorous action, all the muscular apparatus of respiration. Shouting, calling, and loud vociferation, in the open air, both while standing, and while walking or running, are, with due caution, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the fault was all on one side, Miss Hethencourt," summed up the Captain, speaking in guttural consonant and flattened vowel from suppressed emotion. "The—er—the plaintiff must have approached the dog ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... 'i' to the beginning of the name of the lake, as Ingami, and then sounds the 'i' as little as possible, he will have the correct pronunciation. The Spanish n [ny] is employed to denote this sound, and Ngami is spelt nyami—naka means a tusk, nyaka a doctor. Every vowel is sounded in all native words, and the emphasis in pronunciation is put ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... never a sibilant (except in some few so-called 'Romance' languages), but a guttural, it was for the moment discarded; also as no word begins with the letters 'mn'—except 'mnemonics' and its fellows—I concluded that a vowel must be omitted between these letters, and thence that all vowels (except 'a') were omitted; again, as the double 's' can never come after 'n' I saw that either a vowel was omitted between the two 's's,' or that the first word ended after the ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... edition of "Spadacrene Anglica" the original title-page and initial letters have been artistically reproduced by the publishers; the text has not been modernized except in the case of the old vowel forms I and U for the consonants J and V. Otherwise, the original spelling and the use of capitals and italics have been retained. The long S has not been retained. With these slight changes one cannot but admire the forceful English in which it is written, and the clearness ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... permitted the satisfaction of hearing 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 words, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... syntax. The roots are, as a rule, bilateral or trilateral, composed (that is) of two or three letters, all of which are consonants. The consonants determine the general sense of the words, and are alone expressed in the primitive writing; the vowel sounds do but modify more or less the general sense, and are unexpressed until the languages begin to fall into decay. The roots are, almost all of them, more or less physical and sensuous. They are derived in general ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... art thou, that dost torment me thus? This torture should be roar'd in dismal hell. Hath Romeo slain himself? say thou but I, And that bare vowel I shall poison more Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice: I am not I if there be such an I; Or those eyes shut that make thee answer I. If he be slain, say I; or if not, no: Brief sounds determine of my weal ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... now be introduced which has received the name of Semiphonotypy. It requires no new letter: "[D] [p]" for the vowel in but, son, are made from "D p" by a pen-knife. The short vowels, diphthongs, and consonants are all written phonetically, except an occasional "n" "[n]" before k and g, and "th" both "[t]" and "[dh]" leaving only the long vowels in the old spelling. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... marked so as to indicate the pronunciation. The vowel of the accented syllable is marked by the grave accent (') if long, and by ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... curious that this name occurs amongst the Zulu tribes south of the Zambesi, and, as it has no vowel at the end, appears to be of altogether ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... Danish poets were, for the most part, extremely rude in their versification. Their stanzas of four or two lines have not the full rhyme of vowel and consonant, but merely what the Spaniards call the "assonante," or vowel rhyme, and attention seldom seems to have been paid to the number of feet on which the lines moved along. But, however defective their poetry may be in point of harmony of numbers, it ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... not comprehend this then. And so I fashioned my apt phrases, and weighed my synonyms, and echoed this or that vowel very skilfully, I thought, and alliterated my consonants with discretion. In fine, I did not overlook the most meticulous device of the stylist; and I enjoyed it. It was a sort of game; and they taught me at least, those six delightful months, that a man ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... if he had been wielding sword and buckler in an opera, and his narrow chest swelled under the tight buttons of his ragged old frock-coat. Every English word he spoke was supplemented by an Italian vowel, so that his language, though it was perfectly fluent and correct, sounded quite foreign. His extraordinary height and leanness made him grotesque to look at, but neither the comicality of his figure nor his theatrical voice and gesture could kill the ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... the timid equestrian, laying the emphasis on the final syllable of his companion's title, and pronouncing the first as if it were spelt with the third instead of the second vowel. ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... the lower animals is a vowel form of speech. It lacks the consonantal elements, the characteristic of articulation. In this man seems to have at first agreed with them. The infant begins its vocal utterances with simple cries; ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... disappeared; articles and prepositions took the place of the inflectional terminations brought to a high state of artificial perfection in Latin; and the wholesale suppression of unaccented syllables had so contracted the Latin words that they were often scarcely recognizable. The modification of vowel sounds increased the efficacy of the disguise assumed by Latin words masquerading in the Romanic dialects throughout Gaul; and the Celtic and other native words in current use to designate the interests and occupations ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Kocchi. As in all foreign words ending with a vowel, the Portuguese have nasalised the "i." In 1505 it was written "Coxi." See A.C. Burnell's note in Voyage of Linschoten (Hakluyt Society's publications, London, 1885), i, p. 68. This city lies some thirty miles north ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... a hyphen 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
... after a vowel or diphthong except where such a division involves beginning the next syllable with a group of consonants.[12] In that case the consonants are distributed between the two syllables, one consonant going with one syllable and the other with the following, except when the group contains ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... that in cantabile phrases 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 ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... consonants, while the vowels, which give flesh and life to the skeleton, vary according to the grammatical signification of the word. The relations of grammar are thus expressed for the most part by changes of vocalic sound, just as in English the plural of "man" is denoted by a change in the vowel. The verb is but imperfectly developed; it is, in fact, rather a noun than a verb, expressing relation rather than time. Compound words, moreover, are rare, the compounds of our European languages being replaced in the ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... "DISADVANTAGEOUS CORRECTION", the point of the tale depends on the difference between an i with a macron (long vowel) and an i with a breve (short vowel) These have been represented as ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... are idiosyncratic in the original. They have not been changed. In the original some letter combinations such as 'em' or 'an' are occasionally represented by the vowel with a line over the top (macron). Such abbreviations have ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... 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 I believe it will be admitted ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... remarkably good reader, an animal 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 more articulately than this one, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... ... [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
... Letter is an indivisible sound of a particular kind, one that may become a factor in an intelligible sound. Indivisible sounds are uttered by the brutes also, but no one of these is a Letter in our sense of the term. These elementary sounds are either vowels, semivowels, or mutes. A vowel is a Letter having an audible sound without the addition of another Letter. A semivowel, one having an audible sound by the addition of another Letter; e.g. S and R. A mute, one having no sound at all by itself, but becoming ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... written so incorrectly, that the meaning cannot be arrived at by a study of the language, nor from the authority of Scripture. (58) I will not go to such lengths as to say that the Bible, in so far as it contains the Divine law, has always preserved the same vowel-points, the same letters, or the same words (I leave this to be proved by, the Massoretes and other worshippers of the letter), I only, maintain that the meaning by, which alone an utterance is entitled ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... The only words she had learned to pronounce with any degree of distinctness previous to March, 1890, were PAPA, MAMMA, BABY, SISTER. These words she had caught without instruction from the lips of friends. It will be seen that they contain three vowel and six consonant elements, and these formed the foundation for her first real ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... is not absolutely certain when they first reached the country. Some say, immediately after the Captivity; others put it much later. In 1850 several Hebrew rolls of parts of the Pentateuch, in the square character, with vowel-points, were obtained from the above city. There were then no professing Jews to be found, but in recent years a movement has been set on foot to ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... as a: e: i: o: u: y: A: E: I: O: U: in the introductory section on pronunciation (Secs. 1-18), in vocabulary lists, and in charts of inflectional endings. Elsewhere in the text, long-vowel markings have generally ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... to memory every individual word in which the quantity was not predetermined by a mechanical rule—(as it is e. g. in the gen. plural [o]rum, of the second declension, the [e]runt of the third per. plurals of the preterite, &c., or the cases where the vowel is long by position). But what man of sense would forbear to cry out in such a case—'Leave the poor child to his daily reading: practice, under correct tuition, will give him insensibly and without effort all that you would thus endeavour to communicate through a most Herculean exertion.' Whom ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... dancing to me? Have I lately given you cause to think I deserve to have such a punishment hung in terrorem over me? Besides, threatening me is injudicious, for it rouses a spirit of resistance in me not easy to break down. I assure you o [in allusion to my mispronunciation of that vowel] is really greatly improved. I take much pains with it, as also with my deportment; they will, I hope, no longer annoy you when next we meet. You must not call Mrs. J—— my friend, for I do not. I like her ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... most widely from his inferences.(354) In Spinoza's own times the work met with unbounded indignation. Indeed hardly any age could have been less prepared for its reception. So rigorous a theory of verbal inspiration was then held, that the question of the date of the introduction of the Hebrew vowel points was discussed under the idea that inspiration would be overthrown, if the admission was made that they were introduced after the time of the closing of the canon.(355) The tone of fairness in Spinoza's manner, which compels most modern readers to ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... is an indivisible sound, yet not every such sound, but only one which can form part of a group of sounds. For even brutes utter indivisible sounds, none of which I call a letter. The sound I mean may be either a vowel, a semi-vowel, or a mute. A vowel is that which without impact of tongue or lip has an audible sound. A semi-vowel, that which with such impact has an audible sound, as S and R. A mute, that which with ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... find Lady Vavasour engaged in one of the numerous plots that surrounded and endangered the Protector's power. The plot itself seems to have created intense excitement in the capital, and resulted in three persons being tried for high treason, and two executed,—John Gerard, gentleman, Peter Vowel, schoolmaster of Islington, and one Summerset Fox, who pleaded guilty, and whose life was spared. "Some wise men," writes one Thomas Gower in a contemporary letter (still unprinted), "believe that a couple of coy-ducks drew ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... and head and shoulders and whole body, much better than can American children. They were patient and had good memories, but found it hard to think. I judge that they had rarely been expected or taught to think for themselves. Arithmetic was hard for them. Reading in Spanish—where each letter, vowel or consonant has, in general, but one sound and there are no silent letters—was very easy. But reading and spelling in English—where they could not know what sound to give to a letter, and what letters had no sound—was most trying. However, they did, even in reading English, ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 4, October, 1900 • Various
... vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants. It is natural, therefore, that the consonants should be marked first, as being the framework of the word; and no doubt a very simple living language might be written quite intelligibly to the natives ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... do not remember having heard mention of as remarkable, has nearly every consonantal and vowel sound in the language. Try it by the Greek and by the English alphabet; it is a curiosity. Tell me that old Homer did not roll his sightless eyeballs about with delight, as he thundered out these ringing syllables! It seems ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... others he was passing through the Fullers' Bazar at Basrah when his ear was struck by the Dak dak (Arabic letters) and the Dakak-dakak (Arabic letters) of the workmen. In these two onomapoetics we trace the expression which characterises the Arab tongue: all syllables are composed of consonant and vowel, the latter long or short as B and B ; or of a vowelled consonant followed by a consonant as ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... in English poetry will hardly be wondered at, however it may be open to such criticisms as Pope's and Churchill's, when it is noted that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by the vowel a alone, considerably more than 500; by the vowel e, about 450; by the vowel i, nearly 400; by the vowel o, rather more than 400; and by the vowel u, upwards of 260; a calculation entirely exclusive of the ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... 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 Coleridge proved himself the ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Homer, picturing himself as Demodocus, to sing at the games in the court of Alcinous. Phaeacia is the Homeric island of Atlantis; an image of noble and wise government, concealed, (how slightly!) merely by the change of a short vowel for a long one in the name of its queen; yet misunderstood by all later writers, (even by Horace, in his "pinguis, Phaeaxque"). That fable expresses the perpetual error of men in thinking that grace and dignity can only be reached by the soldier, and never by ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... xiii-xv. Unfortunately they have been presented from 'copies' and are therefore full of errors, which are due for the most part, doubtless, to the copyist and not to the sculptor. It is not difficult, however, in most cases under consideration here, to restore the correct reading. Usually only vowel signs are omitted or misread and, here, and there, consonants closely resembling one another as va and cha, va, and dha, ga and ['s]a, la and ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... pleasant for all gentlemen to read and most necessary to remember," was itself an antithesis; the discourses it contains were framed upon the same plan; the sentences are grouped antithetically; while the antithesis is pointed by an equally elaborate repetition of ideas, of vowel sounds and of consonant sounds. Letters, syllables, words, sentences, sentence groups, paragraphs, all are employed for the purpose of producing the antithetical style now known as euphuism. An example will serve to make the matter clearer. ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... connect themselves with Chaucer's use of forms which are now obsolete—more especially of inflexions of verbs and substantives (including several instances of the famous final e), and contractions with the negative ne and other monosyllabic words ending in a vowel, of the initial syllables of words beginning with vowels or with the letter h. These and other variations from later usage in spelling and pronunciation—such as the occurrence of an e (sometimes sounded and sometimes not) at the end of words in which ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish; but charity never faileth. And when all our "dialects" on both sides of the water shall vanish, and we shall speak no more Yorkshire or Cape Cod, or London cockney or "Pike" or "Cracker" vowel flatness, nor write them any more, but all use the noble simplicity of the ideal English, and not indulge in such odd-sounding phrases as this of our critic that "the combatants on both sides were by way of detesting each other," though we speak with the tongues of men and of angels—we shall still ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... call was on Abraham, or more correctly "Abraha," for the genius of the Eskimo language always requires a name to end with a vowel. He is also an excellent and intelligent native assistant. He and his Pauline were very pleased to see us, and expressed themselves in the same strain as the former couple. As his harmonium and ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... remove. Suspecting that the broader sounds are the older, we may surmise that remove and food have retained their old sounds, and that cook, once coke, would have rhymed to our Luke, the vowel being brought a little nearer, perhaps, to the o in our present coke, the fuel, probably so called as used by cooks. If this be so, the Chief Justice Cook[614] of our lawyers, and the Coke (pronounced like the fuel) ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... omitted vowel modifiers and diacritics from all names in the body text: Hakon, Malar, Mjolnir. The footnotes are ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... themselves and are questioned by the leader of the game and must answer without bringing in a word containing a forbidden vowel. Say the vowel "a" is forbidden, the leader asks—"Are you fond of playing the piano?" The answer "Yes, very much," would be correct as the words do not contain the letter "a." But if the answer were—"Yes, and I am fond of singing too," the speaker would have to ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... crowd of Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Americans, bearing colored leis, or wreaths of flowers, which they waved at friends on board, and with which they bedecked them as soon as they came off the gangplank. It was a Babel of tongues in which the strange, vowel-choked language of the Hawaiians ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... mysterious way that he was once accustomed to be very trim and spruce in person. When he speaks, you find that you have a hint of a cultivated accent; he sounds the termination "ing" with precision, and you also notice that such words as "here," "there," "over," are pronounced with a peculiar broad vowel sound at the end. He cannot look you boldly in the face, and it is hard to catch a sight of his eyes, but you may take for granted that the eyes are bad and shifty. The cheeks are probably a little pendulous, and the jaw hangs with a certain slackness. The whole visage looks as if it had been ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... The vowel A is formed by opening the mouth widely: A. Its vowels are to be given the sounds used in ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... Harlez and is apparently a late liturgical compilation of little originality. Schrader's work was published by the Adyar Library in Madras, 1916. Apparently the two forms Pancaratra and Pancaratra are both found, but that with the long vowel is the more usual. Govindacarya's article in J.R.A.S. 1911, p. 951 may ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... uses almost all the types of verse — iambic, trochaic, blank, the sonnet, etc. — and with about equal skill. Three features, however, specially characterize his verse: the careful distribution of vowel-colors and the frequent use of alliteration and of phonetic syzygy,*1* by which last is meant a combination or succession of identical or similar consonants, whether initially, medially, or finally, as for instance the succession of M's in Tennyson's "The moan of doves ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... short vowels; these typically occur as the first vowel in a Malay word (mostly e, but sometimes a, i, u). Letters with breve accents have been replaced with ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... tavern, And there the best of cheer was found Within old Bytown's classic ground; And now I'll close my roll of fame With a most well-remember'd name, A man of dignity supreme Rises to view in memory's dream, Ultra in Toryism's tariff, Was Simon Fraser, Carleton's Sheriff, Personified by the third vowel, Forerunner of W.F. Powell, A high and most important man In the renown'd old Fraser Clan, Who well had worn the Highland tartan, For he was bold as any Spartan, And did his duty mildly, gravely, And wore the sword ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... 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 ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 Physician ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... a semi-vowel written [lr] the sound of which in words of the masculine gender approaches l, in those of the neuter gender r. The o and u, and the t and d, are also frequently blended. The w has not the German ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton |
