"Vowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... infallible inspiration of the Church, and, in consequence, 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 writer, even so lately as in 1888 was reproved ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... 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, ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... she were taking part in a very completely arranged nightmare, but Gerald was in it too Gerald, who had asked if she was an idiot. Well, she wasn't. But she soon would be, she felt. Yet she went on answering the courteous vowel-talk of these impossible people. She had often heard her aunt speak of impossible people. Well, now she knew ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... there is scarcely room for doubt. The pronunciation of V is still undetermined, though there is a great preponderance of evidence in favour of the W sound having been the original one. After the first century A.D. this semi-vowel began to develop into the labiodental consonant v, the intermediate stage being a labial v, such as one may often hear in South Germany at the present day, and which to ordinary ears would seem ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... I 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 hard to think of his going round like a hand-organ man, with such ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... scribes in the best manuscripts. Not only were the letters identical in form with the engrossing hand of the monks, but the innumerable abbreviated forms used in the Latin manuscripts were retained. Thus a stroke over a vowel indicated an omitted m or n, a p with a stroke across it indicated the Latin prefix per, a circle above the line stood for the termination us, an r with a cross meant—rum, and so forth. These abbreviations, which ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... monosyllabic lines in English poetry will hardly be wondered at, however it may be open to such criticisms as Pope's and Churchill's, when it is noted that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by the vowel a alone, considerably more than 500; by the vowel e, about 450; by the vowel i, nearly 400; by the vowel o, rather more than 400; and by the vowel u, upwards of 260; a calculation entirely exclusive of the large number of ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... proper accent over a letter just as infallibly as he writes the proper letters in a word. But, strange to say, it is very common, even with good French scholars (in the book-sense or literary sense of scholarship) to find them putting the acute accent for the grave over a vowel, or the grave instead of the acute, or omitting the circumflex accent ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the vowel sounds,—the symbols, dash and dot, With rules and regulations charging us "Forget-me-not." Wish you could have heard us sound them. It was amusing, too; Seemed like talking Chinese language,—ah, [a], ee; aw, o, oo. Then came the hooks with many crooks to puzzle and perplex; They were so very ...
— Silver Links • Various
... 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
... It's a fearful strain. I rather fancied myself because I can pronounce twenty-four distinct vowel sounds; but your hundred and thirty beat me. I can't hear a bit of ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... to be referred to again and again, and the diacritical marks carefully taught. Instruction in the vowel sounds is an excellent drill in articulation, while a knowledge of the diacritical marks enables the pupil to master these sounds for himself when ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... 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 instead of ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... Mr Brass intended some compliment or other; and it has been argued with show of reason that he would have said Buffon, but made use of a superfluous vowel. Be this as it may, Quilp gave him no time for correction, as he performed that office himself by more than tapping him on the head with the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... one syllable of a word ends with a vowel, and the next syllable begins with the same vowel, the hyphen is placed between the syllables to indicate that the two vowels do not form a diphthong, that is, that they should ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... 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)
... 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 ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... and forwards and dwelling sonorously on each vowel, the holy man seemed the incarnation of Muslim piety; but as the two conspirators passed him with scarce a glance, and made their way to a small gate leading into the great garden bordering on the Nile, his eyes watched them sharply. When they had passed through, he turned towards ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... this text, some place and personal names were printed with a macron over a vowel or vowels. These are shown in this text as follows. For example [a] means a macron appeared over the letter "a" in the text, as in K[a]-ye-fah. S[aa]-hanh-que-ah indicates a single macron appeared over two consecutive ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... 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 when ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... phonology, vocabulary, and grammatical forms. In phonology the most marked difference from both is the substitution of s or z, with a tendency, intensified in later Cornish, to the sound of j or ch, for d or t of Welsh and Breton. Cornish agrees with Breton in not prefixing a vowel (y in Welsh) to words beginning with s followed by a consonant, and its vowel sounds are generally simpler and less diphthongalised than those of Welsh. It agrees with Welsh in changing what one may call the French u sound into î (English ee), ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... 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
... 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
... In the tenth chapter he names with great particularity sixty-six classes of things in which he is always the first: the first of elephants, horses, trees, kings, heroes, etc. "Among letters I am the vowel A." "Among seasons I am spring." "Of the deceitful I ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Lincoln's remarkable success in captivating the popular mind is undoubtedly an unconsciousness of self which enables him, though under the necessity of constantly using the capital I, to do it without any suggestion of egotism. There is no single vowel which men's mouths can pronounce with such difference of effect. That which one shall hide away, as it were, behind the substance of his discourse, or, if he bring it to the front, shall use merely to give an agreeable accent of individuality to what ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the rear the "pusher off" half reclined, graceful and nonchalant. With the exception of the steersman, who was too busy, each had his mouth wide open and was expirating in one long-drawn continuous vowel-sound. This vowel-sound was originally the first part of the word "out." It had long since become conventionalized, but still served its purpose ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... A curious example of deformation. Originally feminine nouns beginning with a vowel took the feminine ma before them, the vowel of ma being elided. Thus, m'amie; but later the word was ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... 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
... coke, roke, etc., for 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 wrong. The lawyer has no ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... he would let him see how much he was mistaken, the puppy! He, Touch-and-go Bullet-head, of Frogpondium, would let Mr. John Smith perceive that he, Bullet-head, could indite, if it so pleased him, a whole paragraph—aye! a whole article—in which that contemptible vowel should not once—not even once—make its appearance. But no;—that would be yielding a point to the said John Smith. He, Bullet-head, would make no alteration in his style, to suit the caprices of any Mr. Smith in Christendom. Perish so vile a thought! The O forever; He would persist ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... you deserved, either, Doctor von Kammacher," he said in his broad dialect, rich in vowel sounds, and recounted a number of cases, of which Frederick had not known, in which good had been repaid by evil tattle. "The people around Plassenberg are not fit for men like you and me. Men like you and me belong in America, the ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... 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 ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... this subject. The word, he avers, is Phoenician: from maphula, one of those kinds of bread named as such by Athenaeus. "It was a cake," says Athenaeus, "baked on a hearth or griddle." He derives this by taking away the final vowel, and then changing l for n; ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... element—the air, etc. Thirdly, the French, who are equally chargeable with the English with barbarism in this particular, dispose of their le and their la without ceremony, and always take care that they shall be absorbed, both in verse and in prose, in the vowel that immediately follows them. Fourthly, and I believe lastly, the practice of cutting short "the" is warranted by Milton, who of all English poets that ever lived, had certainly the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the suggestions of the most recent editions of Cocceius. To the Voetians this conduct was not much better than atheism. They hurled all the curses and plagues of the Bible against every one who whispered that there could be a mistake in the transcription of a word or even of a Hebrew vowel-point. The Cocceian brought all his questions into the pulpit, where he preached them in a manner more adapted to addle the heads of his hearers than to edify their hearts. Hebrew grammars were published for the laity. Even women,—among whom ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... understanding the real nature of the syllabary. Let us take for consideration the consonantal sound represented by the letter b. A moment's consideration will make it clear that this sound enters into a large number of syllables. There are, for example, at least twenty vowel sounds in the English language, not to speak of certain digraphs; that is to say, each of the important vowels has from two to six sounds. Each of these vowel sounds may enter into combination with the b sound alone ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... was terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow. Then gave me recipe for what he calls RISOTTO ALLA BERGAMASCA. When he pronounces a soft O he protrudes his full carnal lips as if he kissed the vowel. Has he? And could he repent? Yes, he could: and cry two round rogue's tears, one from ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... and sometimes on monosyllabic words that are not emphatic, but usually the metrical accent of any given word corresponds to its logical accent. The accentuation of a syllable tends to lengthen the time used in the pronunciation of that syllable, and so we call it long, although the sound of its vowel may be short. Short syllables are those which are unaccented, even though the vowel has the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... strikes your eye is the breaks at the end of 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, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... 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 ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... contrasted elements of the individual 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 ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... 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 ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... lights, or brought into connexion with other facts, according to endless diversities of permutation and combination, furnish grounds for such eternal successions of new speculations as make the facts themselves virtually new. The same Hebrew words are read by different sets of vowel points, and the same hieroglyphics are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... explained his teacher. "It is what we call a mute 'e'; but it exercises a modifying influence on the preceding vowel." ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... of a primitive word is dropped on taking a suffix beginning with a vowel: as, blame able blamable; guide ance guidance; come ing coming; force ible forcible; obscure ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... mean 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 to be called Divine, has come down ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... is remembered that the Jewish books were written on rolls of leather, without much attention to vowel points and with no division into verses or chapters, by uncritical copyists, who altered passages greatly, and did not always even pretend to understand what they were copying, then the reader of Genesis begins to put herself in position to understand how it can be contradictory. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... 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
... are shown 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 ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... diminishing butt. For orderly, he had a black fat Congo boy, in dark blue Belgian uniform, flat-nosed, with wrinkles down the forehead. He was Gilson's man, never looking at him in speaking, and using an open vowel dialect. Before one of the attacks, a soldier came to Gilson with his wife's picture, watch, ring, and money, ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... you see, in alternate snatches of verse and prose. The verse, which was chanted, is not rhymed as a rule, but each laisse, or screed, as in the "Chanson de Roland," runs on the same final assonance, or vowel sound throughout. ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... mixed vowels Oe and Ue, as well as the harsh consonants, which are almost always sacrificed to euphony. And where the language hesitates to make this sacrifice, the vocalists come to the rescue and facilitate matters by arbitrarily changing the difficult vowel or consonant into an easy one. In this they are encouraged by the teachers, who habitually neglect the less sonorous vowels and make their pupils sing all their exercises on the easy vowel A. No wonder, then, that the tones of an Italian singer ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... 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 in expiration. These ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... teach orthography and orthoepy simultaneously. The vocabulary contains several hundred euphonious and peculiarly significant words, heretofore not comprised in spellers of this grade. All lists of words are strictly classified with regard to their formation, their vowel sounds, alphabetic order, accent and number ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman
... the world knows you—you and your children! It sees you fat of figure, an Adam's apple struggling with your every vowel, ponderous of temperament. It sees you a sullen and varicose mistress, whose draperies hang heavy and ludicrous from a pudgy form. It sees you a portly, pursy, foolish Undine struggling awkwardly from out a cyclopean vat of beer. It hears your music in the ta-tata-tata-ta-ta of your ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... and he seems to have judged him rightly. I have met with a passage in Torquato's prose writings (but I cannot lay my hands on it), in which he expresses a singular predilection for verses full of the same vowel. He seems, if I remember rightly, to have regarded it, not merely as a pleasing variety, which it is on occasion, but as a reigning principle. Voltaire (I think, in his treatise on Epic Poetry) has noticed the multitude of o's in the exordium of the Jerusalem.This ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... English, but some nations use it as a vowel— than which nothing could be more absurd. Its original form, which has been but slightly modified, was that of the tail of a subdued dog, and it was not a letter but a character, standing for a Latin verb, jacere, "to throw," ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... which there are twenty six in our language, are divided into vowels and consonants. There are five proper vowels, a, e, i, o, and u. Y is generally a consonant at the beginning of words, and a vowel at the end of them. ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... to the layman and to the general 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 exception of very small areas in the southwest (still inhabited sparsely by Hottentot and Bushman ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... in the pamphlet are produced by inverting or reversing existing letters; but these may possibly be makeshifts, used in place of more ambitious shapes which were beyond the reach of his printer; he suggests, for instance (p. 20) "the sign Taurus with a Foot-Ball between his horns" as one of his vowel symbols. On the whole, we find the vowels much less systematically tackled than the consonants, and it is proposed that accents ("cambrils") should for the most part be used to provide extra symbols; the pamphlet, however, ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... spelling /Lucillius/ is a mere barbarism, the /l/ being doubled to indicate the long vowel: so ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... 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 Bal, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... vowels, a is "dominant" over o and e; o is dominant over e; and any one of the three is dominant over u or i. A dominant vowel is one which has the power of attracting to itself the stress which, except for diphthongization, would fall on the other vowel with which it unites. The vowel losing the stress is called the "absorbed" vowel. This principle, which we find exemplified in the earliest poetic ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... 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
... name 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
... 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 meaning: correspondent, but co-respondent (one ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... 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. ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... 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
... 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 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... 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
... Gunpowder; while Mixed is aptly personified by a curious group of masqueraders. The vowels put in a comical appearance: A with his hands behind him listens to E, who points to I as the subject of his remarks, which must be of a scandalous character, as the injured vowel looks the picture of anger and astonishment. E finds a ready listener in O, who opens his mouth and extends his hands in real ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... be 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 ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... the soft air along, While fluent Greek a vowel'd undersong 200 Kept up among the guests, discoursing low At first, for scarcely was the wine at flow; But when the happy vintage touch'd their brains, Louder they talk, and louder come the strains ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... twelve, or fourteen. Southey cannot believe that the prudent and practical Chaucer would have placed his verse, intended for general reception, in the jeopardy of a reader's discretion for determining when the verse required the sounding, and when the silence, of a vowel, by its nature free to be sounded or left silent, as exigency might require. But he misapprehends the proposed remedy; and the discretion which he supposes is not given. In the two languages from which ours is immediately ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... with Latin has asked for pointers to aid in pronouncing the scientific names of ferns. Following Gray, Wood, and others we have marked each accented syllable with either the grave (') or acute () accent, the former showing that the vowel over which it stands has its long sound, while the latter indicates the short or modified sound. Let it be remembered that any syllable with either of these marks over it is the accented syllable, whose sound will be long or short according to the ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... actively working up my Handbook of Arabic. I also design a skeleton dictionary of Arabic-English. I have got a valuable book from Algiers (if it had but vowel points!). But I cannot publish until I have money to spare. Meanwhile I work ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... in verse is the single rhyme—the rhyme of one syllable. A single rhyme is perfect when the rhymed syllables are accented; when the vowel sounds and the following consonant sounds are identical and when the preceding consonant ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... Edmonde seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this sentence. He instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue English to misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for example, make the vowel in "debt" long, in the teeth of use ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... 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 Semitic dialects by ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... 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
... Valmiki makes the second vowel in this name long or short to suit the exigencies of the verse. Other Indian poets have followed his example, and the same licence will be used in ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... The vowel sounds of w and y are the same as those of u and i. A, e, and o are always vowels. I, u, w, ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... 'Rama,' 'fire,' or 'quality,' there being considered to be three Ramas, three kinds of fire, three qualities (guna); for 4 were used 'veda,' 'age,' or 'ocean,' there being four of each recognized; 'season' for 6, because they reckoned six seasons; 'sage' or 'vowel,' for 7, from the seven sages and the seven vowels; and so on with higher numbers, 'sun' for 12, because of his twelve annual denominations, or 'zodiac' from his twelve signs, and 'nail' for 20, a word incidentally ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... orignial list contains characters that are not found in normal ASCII, indicating the long or short stress to be put on the vowels. These are rendered below by the characters in [square brackets], thus: A ")" indicates a short vowel, and a "" indicates a long. So "hay" would be rendered as "h[a]" and "aha" would ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... bearings, noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for future reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter. If you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friend at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A, for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R, thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis, you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward, that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects you were passing at the moment ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not the author, was supreme in these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fills nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds, in which, as if to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as men's ears differ, he tells us that the short a sound is the same in man and Darby, the short o sound in God and does, and ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... which this gentleman is now teaching; nothing, more strangely inconsistent, than are some of his declarations and professions. For instance: "A consonant is a letter that cannot be perfectly sounded without the help of a vowel."—Kirkham's Gram., p. 19. Again: "A consonant is not only capable of being perfectly sounded without the help of a vowel, but, moreover, of forming, like a vowel, a separate syllable."—Kirkham's Elocution, p. 32. Take a second example. He makes "ADJECTIVE PRONOUNS" a prominent ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... to-day," observed the woman, with the broad vowel sound which I shall not attempt to reproduce in print. "He was going to ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... for this tone emission is, first of all, the cultivation of the breath prop, then attacking the vowel sound o o in the medium voice, which requires a low position of the larynx, and exercises on the ascending scale until the higher notes have been brought down, as it were, and gain some of the body and support of the lower notes without losing ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... She lent a faint impression of the double e to the initial vowel. She slurred the rest, until the y sound squinted in. Not ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... not think the fault was all on one side, Miss Hethencourt," summed up the Captain, speaking in guttural consonant and flattened vowel from suppressed emotion. "The—er—the plaintiff must have approached the dog as he ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... became concentrated into a vivid, steady flame. The few words she spoke to her daughter were sharply cut, a delightful contrast in his ear to the dialect to which he was accustomed, distinguished by its universal vowel and suppression of the consonants. How he inwardly rejoiced to hear the sound of the second "t" in the word "distinct," when she told her little messenger that Mr. Cobb had been "distinctly" ordered to send the coals yesterday. He ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... were following up the scythes as they chased the falling waves of grass, (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 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... enclosed in pluses represent boldface; Vowels followed by a colon represent a long vowel (printed with a macron in the ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... roots than that of the Porto Rican "jibaro" and is more easily understood by the outsider. Slight differences of pronunciation are noticeable in different parts of the country: the people of Seibo are inclined to use the vowel "i" instead of the consonant "r" and say "poique" instead of "porque," somewhat as the New York street urchin says "boid" for "bird"; the people of Santiago sometimes drop the "r" entirely and say "poque," as the Southern negro in the United States says "fo" for ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... the backbone of the language, and hence, as the essential feature in a rhyme; and never allows the repetition of a consonant in a rhyme to be modified by a change in the preceding vowel, or by the recurrence of the rhyming syllable in a different word—or the repetition of a consonant in blank verse to create a half-consonance resembling a rhyme: though other poets do not ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... set out in a language worthy of the eloquent. If we cannot say of the Maori tongue as Gibbon said of Greek, that it "can give a soul to the objects of sense and a body to the abstractions of philosophy," we can at any rate claim for it that it is a musical and vigorous speech. Full of vowel-sounds, entirely without sibilants, but rich in guttural and chest notes, it may be made at will to sound liquid or virile, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... and freely. She was then instructed to make the sound "e" at the end of expiration. This she was unable to do at first, but upon persistence and passive placing of her mouth in the proper position for the sound, she was able to whisper "e." From this she rapidly went on to the other vowel sounds. Then the aspirate "h" was added, later the explosives, "p," etc., until at the end of about two hours she was enabled to whisper anything desired. Her husband was instructed not to allow ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... 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, with examples, and key-words from English, ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... be possible, 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... kind of provincial accent!" (Cuthbert's English, by the way, was not regarded by his intimates as the perfect thing!) "He doesn't speak like a Scotch Johnny at all! You never hear an 'Aye, aye' or 'd'ye ken?'—not a broad vowel even! Why, he might have lived all his life this side the border, to judge by his ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... could catch the just pronunciation of a word. For my own part, no language seemed easier to acquire than this; every harsh and sibilant consonant being banished from it, and almost every word ending in a vowel. The only requisite, was a nice ear to distinguish the numerous modifications of the vowels which must naturally occur in a language confined to few consonants, and which, once rightly understood, give a great degree of delicacy to conversation. Amongst several ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... Doth, is what enervates the last Line. But 'twould be still better enervated if Mr. Philips had used only such Words as have very few Consonants in them. For by Consonants, joyn'd with the Vowel O, a Writer may render his Language, in Epick Poetry, just as Sonorous as he will; and by the want of Consonants and by delighting in the other soft Vowels he may render it weak. I cannot see that Mr. PHILIPS has any Line where the Language ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... things was equally complex and uncouth, equally the bond-slave of tradition; here a rising and there a bow, now three steps backwards and now a beating of the breast, this bit for the congregation and that for the minister, variants of a page, a word, a syllable, even a vowel, ready for every possible contingency. Their religious consciousness was largely a musical box—the thrill of the ram's horn, the cadenza of psalmic phrase, the jubilance of a festival "Amen" and the sobriety of a work-a-day "Amen," the Passover melodies and the Pentecost, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... seas. What cares any man profoundly conscious of the wants both of 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 Reason, between Religion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... it down, most of my readers would no more understand than they would Phoenician: we must therefore content ourselves with what their conversation comes to in English, which, if deficient compared with Gaelic in vowel-sounds, yet serves to say most things capable of ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... And You Remember. Was that his meaning? At Your Risk. Were the letters short for that reminder? Anticipate Your Retribution. Did they stand for that warning? Out-dacious Youth Repent? But no; for that, a O was happily wanting, and the vowel here was a A. ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... strings, drew forth from them a sweet and plaintive note, like the tender remonstrance of a neglected friend. No language says so much in so short space as music, nor will, till we banish those dead bones, consonants, and adopt the pure vowel speech of infants ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... for the pronunciation of Chaucer's language, so far as it differs from ours, are these: Every letter should be sounded, especially the final e (except when it is to be suppressed before another vowel). A large proportion of the rimes are therefore feminine. The following vowel sounds should be observed: Stressed a like modern a in father. Stressed e and ee like e in fete or ea in breath. Stressed i ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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
... the 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 without any vowel sounds ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... that the exercises which 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 ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... chafing-dish stood on the piano; a leaf of sheet music supported a stack of sandwiches in a chair. Mary came in, dressed 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 "e" it ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... 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 ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... riddles call for comment. Filipino riddles, in whatever language, are likely to be in poetical form. The commonest type is in two well-balanced, rhyming lines. Filipino versification is less exacting in its demand in rhyme than our own; it is sufficient if the final syllables contain the same vowel; thus Rizal says—ayup and pagud, aval and alam, rhyme. The commonest riddle verse contains five or seven, ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... from right to left, instead of from left to right, but the consonants only of the several words are written in distinct characters on the line; the vowels being little dots or dashes standing under the consonants, or within their curves. These vowel points were not used in the original Hebrew; they are a modern invention, originating some centuries after Christ. It is true that it was the belief of the Jews in former times that these vowel points were ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... doubt that the Arabic name, Usdum, is identical with Sodom, by a well-known custom of the language to invert the consonant and vowel of the first syllable. But even this is brought back to the original state in the adjective form. Thus I heard our guides speak of the Jebel Sid'mi, meaning the Khash'm or Jebel ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... accomplished by "mouthing" the sounds from the larynx. The distinct sounds, or words, are usually complex in nature, being made up of two or more elementary sounds. These are classed either as vowels or consonants and are represented by the different letters of the alphabet. The vowel sounds are made with the mouth open and are more nearly the pure vibrations of the vocal cords. The consonants are modifications of the vocal cord vibrations produced by the tongue, teeth, lips, ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... suicide of mankind, and in throwing a "bloody spittle of contempt" at life. A "bloody spittle," as is known from Arthur Rimbaud's sonnets on consonants, stands before the eyes of everyone who pronounces the vowel i, just as the vowel a brings up the picture of "black, shaggy flies, which buzz around ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... me to explain," said the frivolous voice; "but the final vowel of the first word dissatisfied him and he substituted another. The capabilities of errand-boys with pencil or chalk should never be lost sight of when one is choosing a name for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... character e, 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
... indicates. Each of the lines is repeated as often as the singer may desire, the prolongation of the song being governed by his inspired condition. The same peculiarity governs the insertion, between words and at the end of lines, of apparently meaningless vowel sounds, to reproduce and prolong the last notes sounded. This may be done ad libitum, rythmical accentuation being maintained by gently ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... description of the fens haunted by Grendel. It will need only one or two readings aloud to show that many of these strange-looking words are practically the same as those we still use, though many of the vowel sounds were pronounced ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... was necessary to determine the declension of a substantive. There was the weak, or simple declension for words ending in a vowel (as, eage, steorra, tunga), and the strong declension for words ending in a consonant (smidh, spraec, le['a]f). The letters i and u were dealt with as semivowels, semi-vowels being dealt with as consonants; so that words like sunu and gifu belonged to the ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... 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,' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... countryman never flattens a vowel; if he changes it he always makes it sharp. He would be more likely to say: "Pleasure does make us Yankee kind er winch, as if 'twas suthin' paid for by the inch." There are other instances of similar sort; but, nevertheless, ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... David Bogue, Fleet Street. 1852. Mr. Reach was very particular about the pronunciation of his name. Being a native of Inverness, the last vowel was guttural. One day, dining with Douglas Jerrold, who insisted on addressing him as Mr. Reek or Reech, "No," said the other; "my name is neither Reek nor Reech,but Reach," "Very well," said Jerrold, "Mr. Reach will you ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... of the name of the symbol which we can reach is the Hebrew beth, to which the Phoenician must have been closely akin, as is shown by the Greek [Greek: beta], which is borrowed from it with a vowel affixed. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... vowels and consonants alike; as, an eagle, an ball, an hair, an use. Still later, and for the sake of ease in speaking, the word came to have the two forms mentioned above; and an was retained before letters having vowel sounds, but it dropped its n and became a before letters having consonant sounds. This is the ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... 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
... thee; teu-re, he, him. In the Tamanac, u-re, I; amare or anja, thou; iteu-ja, he. The radical of the first and of third person is in the Chayma u and teu.* (* We must not wonder at those roots which reduce themselves to a single vowel. In a language of the Old Continent, the structure of which is so artificially complicated, (the Biscayan,) the family name Ugarte (between the waters) contains the u of ura (water) and arte between. The g is added for the sake of euphony.) ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... see in the specimen of Hebrew given on this page are called 'vowel-points,' and are a guide to the sound of the word; but in the old, old days of which we are speaking, these dots had not been invented. The reader had nothing but consonants before him, and was ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... proportion between stressed or heavily accented syllables and unstressed. That is clear even though we are unable to discriminate the proportion in every case or even to tell whether there were fixed rules for it; the vowel-system of our Hebrew text being possibly different from what prevailed in ancient Hebrew. But on the whole it is probable that as in other primitive poetries(42) there were no exact or rigorous rules as to the proportion of beats or stresses in the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... Noster Valley," and after a few months left the country. His great services in reducing the Maori language to written form have hardly been sufficiently recognised. Marsden, like the other settlers, could never adapt himself to the Italian vowel sounds, and at his request Kendall wrote out a new vocabulary on a different system; but he soon found it unsatisfactory, and returned to the principles which he had worked out with Professor Lee. For the rest of his life—in ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... (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. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... sensations 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 ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... especially, are a sort of bond which pervades all the other letters, so that without a vowel one consonant cannot be joined ...
— Sophist • Plato
... the First Declension form their genitive in que, and usually are such as terminate in a vowel. ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... have for a long time lien neglected so in original: "lain"? pollous ede kai oudena noon echontas text reads pellous; last vowel in echontas unclear both St. Uincentiusand Senafinus "Senafinus" could not be identified, but cannot be Serafinus Aristotle was the viol of Gods wrath spelling "viol" as in original the world is much beholden to Aristotle for all its sciences text ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... sound remained practically unchanged. On the other hand, the long sound of a in the Attic and Ionic dialects passed into an open e-sound, which in the Ionic alphabet was represented by the same symbol as the original e-sound (see ALPHABET: Greek). The vowel sounds vary from language to language, and the a symbol has, in consequence, to represent in many cases sounds which are not identical with the Greek a whether long or short, and also to represent several different vowel sounds in the same language. Thus the New English Dictionary distinguishes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Bilancelle—some fifteen or sixteen miles out at sea, and when they saw us coming along with all canvass set, they hauled up their nets and ran with all speed for shore. Rather absurd, wasn't it? but, as I told Leslie about his friends, 'the blunder wasn't so great after all; there was only a vowel ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... but necessary in his situation, was, at the very same time, exercised by the protector, in the capital punishment of Gerard and Vowel, two royalists, who were accused of conspiring against his life. He had erected a high court of justice for their trial; an infringement of the ancient laws which at this time was become familiar, but one to which no custom or precedent could reconcile the nation. Juries were found altogether ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... 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 ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... 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 scias is ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 3 • Various
... falls on a vowel, that vowel should have a long sound, as in vo'cal; but when it falls on or after a consonant, the preceding vowel has a short sound, ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... again be called a dunce. O, in the exclamation Oh! is happily called by its alphabetical name; but in to, we can hardly know it again, and in morning and wonder, it has a third and a fourth additional sound. The amphibious letter y, which is either a vowel or a consonant, has one sound in one character, and two sounds in the other; as a consonant, it is pronounced as in yesterday; in try, it is sounded as i; in any, and in the termination of ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... other passages in his writings may be seen his view of the moral significance of poetry. He desired, however, to formulate for himself and for students certain metrical laws. What differentiates poetry from prose? How does a writer produce certain effects with certain rhythms and vowel and consonant arrangements? The student wishes to know why the forms are fair and hear how the tale is told. By the study of rhythm, tune, and color, Lanier believed that one might receive "a whole new ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... she said, with 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 children to be cared for and washed. Not only the siege ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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 ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... seat themselves and are questioned by the leader of the game and must answer without bringing in a word containing a forbidden vowel. Say the vowel "a" is forbidden, the leader asks—"Are you fond of playing the piano?" The answer "Yes, very much," would be correct as the words do not contain the letter "a." But if the answer were—"Yes, and I am fond of singing too," the speaker would have to pay a forfeit. Any vowel ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... toiled vainly. To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me, I give one bubbling cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible, and I have no thought of trying to defend it. As I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling, I append a table of some common vowel sounds which no one need consult; and just to prove that I belong to my age and have in me the stuff of a reformer, I have used modification marks throughout. Thus I can tell myself, not without pride, that I have added ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... 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 Soul ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... in our own language. An attempt of the kind has been made by a clever writer, in the Retrospective Review. (Vol. iv. art. 2.) If it has failed, it is from the impediments presented by the language, which has not nearly the same amount of vowel terminations, nor of simple uniform vowel sounds, as the Spanish; the double termination, however full of grace and beauty in the Castilian, assumes, perhaps from the effect of association, rather a doggerel ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... 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
... days at school for a boy of six without the language. But the national linguistic gift inherent in the Dutch race came to the boy's rescue, and as the roots of the Anglo-Saxon lie in the Frisian tongue, and thus in the language of his native country, Edward soon found that with a change of vowel here and there the English language was not so difficult of conquest. At all events, he ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... tonic accent, an insuperable difficulty in English, on account of its irregularity and elusiveness, is in Esperanto invariably on the last vowel but one. ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen |
