"Polyglot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... towards the roadside tangle, where this "rollicking polyglot" is entertaining himself and his mate, brooding over her speckled eggs in a bulky nest set in a most inaccessible briery part of the thicket, can you hope to hear him rattle through his variety performance. Walk boldly or noisily past his retreat, and there is "silence there and nothing ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... calling me, I left him invoking a most comprehensive and polyglot curse upon the head of Imbozwi, to whom he rightly attributed all ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... had been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, after he had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed to him a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandish tongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, past Moorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, in final and frenzied search ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... had allowed more than ever a free hand, on purpose to escort her to the Continent and encompass her there, and had dedicated to her, from the moment of their meeting, all the treasures of his experience. She had judged him in advance—polyglot and universal, very dear and very deep—as probably but a swindler finished to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying one well-kept Italian hand to his heart and plunging the other straight into her pocket, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... Frida's library offered him an amazing choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Bjoernsen and Ibsen, besides a great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and Norwegian. Here and there he came across some ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... thus prematurely to take the party over, suddenly perceives the advancing P. & O., now not much more than a mile away. He draws the distracted officer's attention to the phenomenon and leads him to understand that to start now would lead to an inevitable collision and a watery grave. The polyglot argument waxes furious, the men taking it up in their turn, when their leader falls out exhausted, and the Arab is still keeping up his end triumphantly when the great ship reaches us and slowly steams by, while curious passengers eye us from her decks, their minds doubtless ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... while officiating at the chapel of the Bavarian Legation in London that he began contributing the Prout papers to Fraser's Magazine. These consisted of fanciful narratives, each serving as a vehicle for the display of his wonderful polyglot learning, and containing translations of well-known English songs into Latin, Greek, French, and Italian verse, which later he seriously represented as the true originals from which the English authors had boldly plagiarized. He also introduced into his stories the songs of France ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... relate another amusing incident. Unable to get at my towels packed in my registered baggage, and ignorant of the Russian language, I inquired of a polyglot fellow-passenger what was the Russian word for towel, so that I could ask ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... kits have come on from Pynaar's River. Several fellows came round to see me, and Williams brought some duff, and Ramsey some light literature; Williams also brought a Times, in which I read about the massacre in China. I'm afraid the polyglot avengers will quarrel among themselves. Restless night. I believe I shall never sleep well under a roof again. A roof in London will ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... polyglot and cosmopolitan, like most of his class, but a Frenchman, or, more likely from his accent, a Swiss. "I never saw ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... part of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed in World War I. It fell under communist rule following World War II. A revolt in 1956 and an announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact was met with massive military intervention by Moscow. In the more ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... doves, the soft tones of the golden oriole, and the lively chatter of the red cardinal; by night the booming note of the bull-bat, the sonorous call of the trumpeter swan, and that lay far excelling all—the clear song of the polyglot thrush, the famed ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... universality of interest, transcending the limits of language and of race. To no poem in the English language has the same kind of homage been paid so abundantly. Of what other poem is there a polyglot edition? Italy and England have competed with their polyglot editions of the Elegy: Torri's, bearing the title, 'Elegia di Tomaso Gray sopra un Cimitero di Campagna, tradotta dall' Inglese in piu lingue: Verona, 1817; Livorno, 1843;' and Van Voorst's London edition." Professor ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... and it was very much through his urgent recommendation that the foreman of the printing office gave him a chance. The foreman did not in the least believe that the green-looking young fellow before him could set in type one page of the polyglot Testament ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... briskly assailed the rule as a disrespect to the sex, which reflected even upon the Virgin, the object, as he was forced to allow, of their high veneration. He smiled patiently, and confessed that Mrs. Vervain had all the reasons on her side. At the polyglot printing-office, where she handsomely bought every kind of Armenian book and pamphlet, and thus repaid in the only way possible the trouble their visit had given, he did not offer to take leave of them, but after speaking with Ferris, of whom he seemed an old friend, ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... altogether rely upon one's self alone; a woman's ear is not infallible, so says Saint Augustine; and I, therefore, wished to satisfy myself by other opinions beside my own, and as my Naiad, who, in her character of a goddess, is polyglot,—is not that the ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... cosmopolitan. The barriers created by differences of language are overcome. The custom of learning foreign languages has become more diffused. The most important writings, in whatever country they appear, circulate through translations in all other civilized lands. All well-stored libraries are polyglot. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... There was an enormous list of Trustees and the unwieldy character of the board, coupled with the irregular habits of the President, made the failure of the enterprise inevitable. Still it offered in its catalogues a good course of study and gave exhibitions, at which polyglot orations were delivered. The late Prof. Perley R. Lovejoy was the life of the institution and, after several classes had graduated, the University finally ceased to be, when Mr. Lovejoy accepted a position as Professor in the ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... furnished some extracts for his friend Selden's Marmora Arundeliana, and he deposited the manuscript itself in the Cottonian Library. Dr. Walton also found Usher's collection of much use in preparing his Polyglot Bible. Several of the manuscripts which had belonged to Usher were given to the Bodleian Library by James Tyrrell, the historian, who was the Archbishop's grandson. It was Usher's intention to have left his library to Trinity College, but having lost all his other ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... his kaleidoscopic character to wonder at, some new accomplishment to admire. On one occasion—it was at the opera bouffe—this musical prodigy exhibited a playfulness and an exuberance of wit and humor that Aurora had never dreamed of. He ran the gamut of vocal conceit, and the polyglot fertility of his fancy simply astounded his rapt auditor. She was dazed, enchanted, spellbound. So here we find the fair Aurora passing from the condition of pity ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... Liberal Ascendancy: Tisza, Szapary, Wekerle, and Banffy.*—The primary policy of Tisza was to convert the polyglot Hungarian kingdom into a centralized and homogeneous Magyar state, and to this end he did not hesitate to employ the most relentless and sometimes unscrupulous means. Nominally a Liberal, he trampled the principles of liberalism ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... over, a polyglot conversation ensued in French by the Padre and Mrs. Brimmer, and in broken English by Miss Chubb, Miss Keene, and the other passengers with the Commander's secretary, varied by occasional scraps of college Latin from Mr. Crosby, the whole aided by occasional appeals ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... is superimposed with his old hankering for the oral and polyglot system of buncoing. That man had a vocabulary of about 10,000 words and synonyms, which arrayed themselves into contraband sophistries and parables ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... The polyglot Tescheles was of a famous musical family, of mixed German and Russian origin, naturalized in England and domiciled in France—a true cosmopolite and a wonderful linguist, besides being also a cultivated musician and excellent painter; and all the musicians, famous or otherwise, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... for Conferences and Courses of Study. The problem to be grappled with by this Society and others working on similar lines is no doubt one of immense difficulty. It is nothing less than the education in citizenship of the most heterogeneous, polyglot, and in some respects ignorant and degraded population ever assembled in a single city, since the days of Imperial Rome. The spread of political enlightenment in New York and other cities cannot possibly ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the prohibitory law in Indian Territory, the resubmission of the prohibitory constitution of Maine, and in preserving the prohibitory law of Vermont. It has secured 20,000,000 signatures and attestations, including 7,000,000 on the Polyglot Petition to the governments of the world. Thousands of girls have been rescued from lives of shame and tens of thousands of men have signed the total abstinence pledge and been redeemed from ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Afterwards went to the Colonial Office, and had Robert Hay's assistance in my inquiries; then to the French Ambassador for my passports. Picked up Sotheby, who endeavoured to saddle me for a review of his polyglot Virgil. I fear I shall scarce convince him that I know nothing of the Latin lingo. Sir R.H. Inglis, Richard Sharp, and other friends called. We dined at Miss Dumergue's, and spent a part of our ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... humanity in the bustle and confusion, in the cram and crush, in the wedge and the jam, in the squeezing and shouting, in the hubbub and medley. Such a jolly, rampant, screaming, fighting, maddening, jostling, polyglot, quarrelling, laughing broth of a Vanity Fair! Mendicants, vendors, buyers, gossips, showmen, all swelled ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 700 patients. Anyone who was likely to be sick for any length of time was sent to India whenever the opportunity arose. Down at the British Hospital on the river front they were sending cases off that were likely to be more than three days ill. It was an oriental polyglot scene down there on the hospital quay in the comparative cool of evening, when the big white hospital ship lay off the bank and crowds of ticketed patients sat under the shelters waiting their turn to embark. Now and then a pale nurse, dressed in white, with white helmet ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... meditation Of the philosophic scribe, From the poet's inspiration, For the cynic's polished gibe, We invoke narcotic nurses In their jargon from afar, I indite these modest verses On a polyglot cigar. ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... languages, greeting all the newcomers, and getting mixed in his "Yes, sir," "Ja, wohl," and "Si, signor." Amedee was an inexperienced tourist, who did not drag along with him a dozen trunks, and had not a rich and indolent air; so he was quickly despatched by the Swiss polyglot into a fourth-story room, which looked out into an open well, and was so gloomy that while he washed his hands he was afraid of falling ill and dying there without help. A notice written in four languages hung upon the wall, and, to add to his cheerfulness, it advised ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... rapidly filling with the polyglot crowd of democratic solidarists, Ernest Le Breton and his brother were waiting in the chilly little drawing-room at Epsilon Terrrace, Bayswater, for the expected arrival of Harry Oswald. Ernest had promised to introduce ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... "As for myself, I have been unceasingly occupied for such a number of years in this mass," Molendino he calls them, "that that day seemed, as it were, a holiday in which I have not laboured so much as sixteen or eighteen hours in these enlarging lexicons and Polyglot Bibles." ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Nacaires), the great kettledrum signalling action. Nakshatra. Nalanda. Nan-Chao, formerly Ai-Lao, Shan dynasty in Yun-nan. Nancouri. Nanghin (Ngan-king). Nangiass, Mongol name of Manzi. Nankau, archway in Pass of, with polyglot inscription. Nanking, not named by Polo. Nanwuli. Naobanjan. Naoshirwan. Naphtha in the Caucasian country. —— Fire used in war by the Karaunahs. Napier, Sir C. Napoleon III., his researches and experiments on mediaeval engines of war. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... winding and mountainous streets and its polyglot population, Matadi is a picturesque spot. It is the goal of every official through the long years of his service in the bush for at this place he boards the steamer that takes him to Europe. This is the pleasant side of the picture. On the ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... to make acquaintances among the polyglot population of the neighborhood. Their old hotel, the culinary aristocrat of the district, possessed a cafe in which, with true French hospitality, patrons were permitted to occupy tables indefinitely on the strength of the slenderest ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... has its own customs, superstitions, traditions, architecture, and government; wherefore not its own language? We maintain that it has, and that this tongue, which is not enumerated by Adelung, which possesses no grammar and barely a lexicon of its own, and which is not numbered among the polyglot achievements of Mezzofanti or Burritt, has yet a right to its place ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... there is little educational value—and perhaps it is deeducational—to learn to tell the time of day or name a spade in several different tongues or to learn to say the Lord's Prayer in many different languages, any one of which the Lord only can understand. The polyglot people that one meets on great international highways of travel are linguists only in the sense that the moke on the variety stage who plays a dozen instruments equally badly is a musician. It is a psychological impossibility ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... so poetical in itself to be poetical, without any officious help from himself, and that, though an artist, he does not enter on any of those disquisitions which would have made Sir Joshua shift his trumpet. On the whole, we are inclined to forgive him the polyglot lumber of his chapter on the Evil Eye in consideration of the scenery and galleries which he has spared us. We think we see symptoms that the Nature-mania which began with Rousseau is on the decline, and that men and their ways are getting into fashion again as worth study. The good time ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... etymological index of Hebrew proper names, appeared first in the Bible of Sweynheym and Pannartz, Rome, 1471, and was reprinted without change in most of the editions previous to 1515. In the Complutensian Polyglot it underwent revision and the revised form appears in all the editions of Yolande Bonhomme, with due acknowledgment to Cardinal Ximenes. The Index rerum et sententiarum, however, announced in the title as a new addition to this edition (as it had ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... conception of domestic liberty which makes it rest on a threefold support—divorce at will, an unrestrained printing-press, and the encyclopaedic education of polyglot children. But the truth is that Milton's classification is an after-thought. The pamphlets that he names were all written by him much about the same time, between 1643 and 1645; but the true history of their origin is more interesting ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... mothers—by taking special pains to translate into it the best thought of the world. This is a truly marvellous work. It has been done during the present generation, and Webster's Dictionary defines it as a polyglot jargon used for inter-communication by Jews ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... down stairs," said Lady Mabel, "has been amusing us at dinner with his version of our adventure at the ford of the Cayo; and a very good story he makes of it, giving some rich samples of Captain Hatton's polyglot eloquence. He, alone, seems not to have been in the dark; and saw all, and more than all, that occurred—nor does he forget you in the picture. But, papa cannot see the wit ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... to be a mixture of English, French, and Spanish. Quite a polyglot the friend of your ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... remarked one of the augurs of Red Dog, French Pete, a polyglot jester, "that while every fool went to taking up claims where the gold had already been found no one thought of stepping into the old man's old choux in the cabbage-garden!" Any doubt, however, of the alliance of the families was dissipated by the intimacy ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... unprogressive polyglot settlement, and the place assumed a still more primeval character when the Indian Reservation was formed near by. When French Canadian settlers arrived, however, the place became less discordant to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... professorships all that he considered useful in the arts. Emulation was encouraged, and every effort was made to draw talent from obscurity. To this enlightened ecclesiastic is the world indebted for the undertaking of the Polyglot Bible, which, in connection with other learned works, led the university to be spoken of as one of the greatest educational establishments in the world. From far and near were people drawn to it. King Ferdinand ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... place the whole in a clear light, was as shattering as it was rapid. Another thought to entrap her by asking what language the angelic visitors of her solitude had talked—as though heavenly counsels could want polyglot interpreters for every word, or that God needed language at all in whispering thoughts to a human heart. Then came a worse devil, who asked her whether the Archangel Michael had appeared naked. Not comprehending the vile insinuation, Joanna, whose ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... this metropolis of universal thought. At its base are written some ancient titles of humanity which architecture had not registered. To the left of the entrance has been fixed the ancient bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot Bible rears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero and some other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... interpreter and your directory. He controls the other servants with a rod of iron, but bows to the earth before the mem, or the master. For his ten Mexican dollars a month he takes all the burdens from your shoulders, and stands between you and the rude outside polyglot world. He is a hero-worshipper, and if you are a Tuan Besar—great man—he will double his attentions, and spread your fame far and ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... member of the public had perceived long ago, on the Idea being originally mooted, that there was really nothing at all in it; and the Chuckler had a very funny article, bursting with new and flowery turns of speech, by its special polyglot contributor who made you die o' laughing about the Peirastic and ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... nothing of our want—we have had the OPERA this winter; had it in great variety and perfection, and, as many a reader can testify, with by no means thin houses. Grau has been busy—the most courteous and indefatigable polyglot and active of impresarios, with the good-natured Gosche, heralding a troupe of all the stars, D'Angri, Hinckley, Kellogg, Brignoli, Susini, and all the rest, including divers new singing birds. Maretzek has led, and we have had a range from Mozart to Verdi, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... landing at Sanjak Kalessi to take luncheon and to see the huge old-fashioned guns in the fort, with their stone balls (of granite or marble, two feet in diameter), once thought so formidable. We had been the round of the Greek cafes which flourish in such numbers in Smyrna, where polyglot concerts and the worst features of the cafe chantant seem never to tire their patrons. We had seen a Persian caravan start—a sight well worth rising early for, if only to see their outlandish drivers lash the loads upon the camels, which groan and bellow and scold during the operation, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... lamb, and the part of second fiddle would never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature. He talked only when he had to, and then his speech was like his walk to the table, filled with jerks and halts as he groped in his polyglot vocabulary for words, debating over words he knew were fit but which he feared he could not pronounce, rejecting other words he knew would not be understood or would be raw and harsh. But all the time he was oppressed by the consciousness that this carefulness of diction was making ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... here about the phases of my journey. At Rheine 1 changed trains, turned due north and became a German seaman. There was little risk in a defective accent—sailors are so polyglot; while an English sailor straying about Esens might excite curiosity. Yesterday I had paid no heed to the landscape; to-day I neglected nothing that ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Invitation a la Valse, Valse, op. 18; Souvenir d'Andalousie, Bolero, op. 19—a bolero which sounds Polish!—Le Banquet Infernal, the First Scherzo, op. 20—what a misnomer!—Ballade ohne Worte, the G minor Ballade—there is a polyglot mess for you!—Les Plaintives, Nocturnes, op. 27; La Meditation, Second Scherzo, B flat minor- meditation it is not!—II Lamento e la Consolazione, Nocturnes, op. 32; Les Soupirs, Nocturnes, op. 37, and Les Favorites, Polonaises, op. 40. The C minor Polonaise of this opus was never, is not now, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... said in his polyglot speech. "Hi'll not got a damned thing lef'. How many loads you'll got ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... persiflage, perspicacious, perspicuity, pertinacious, pharmaceutic, phenomenal, phlegmatic, phraseology, pictorial, piquant, pique, plagiarize, platitudinous, platonic, plebeian, plenipotentiary, plethora, pneumatic, poignant, polity, poltroon, polyglot, pontifical, portentous, posterior, posthumous, potent, potential, pragmatic, preamble, precarious, precocious, precursor, predatory, predestination, predicament, preemptory, prelate, preliminary, preposterous, prerequisite, prerogative, presentiment, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... point of the best tier, with the cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole scene and with its withdrawing rooms behind for more detached conversation; for easy—when not indeed slightly difficult— polyglot talk, artful bibite, artful cigarettes too, straight from the hand of the hostess, who could do all that belonged to a hostess, place people in relation and keep them so, take up and put down the topic, cause ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... words, but it is seldom that a Russian shows any pride in his linguistic accomplishments, or that he takes it otherwise than as a matter of course. Stevenson, writing from Mentone to his mother, 7 January 1874, said: "We have two little Russian girls, with the youngest of whom, a little polyglot button of a three-year-old, I had the most laughable little scene at lunch to-day. . . . She said something in Italian which made everybody laugh very much . . .; after some examination, she announced emphatically to the whole table, in German, that ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... unsanitary lunch. We jotted them down at express speed, with changes of tongue so abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, and in the place where our minds should have been sounded only a confused chaotic uproar like a wrangling within the covers of a polyglot dictionary. Then suddenly I landed a Russian! It was the final straw. I like to speak Spanish, I can endure the creaking of Turks attempting to talk Italian, I can bend an ear to the excruciating "French" of Martinique negroes, I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... young housemaid, in love with Robin. She hates Polyglot, the tutor of "Master Charles," but is very fond of Charles. Molly tries to get "the tuterer Polypot" into a scrape, but finds, to her consternation, that Master Charles is in reality the party to be blamed.—J. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... distance from the cathedral—is about sixty English feet long, low, and rather narrow. It is absolutely crammed with books, in the most shameful state of confusion. I saw, for the first time in Normandy, and with absolute gladness of heart, a copy of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible; of which the four latter volumes, in vellum binding, were tall and good: the earlier ones, in calf, not so desirable. For the first time too, since treading Norman soil, I saw a tolerably good sprinkle of Italian books. But the collection ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Schroderae Dellense is a still bigger horticultural swaggerer. O. Coradenei! likewise O. Crispum! I only wish that your Godmother, Flora, Would insist upon shorter and more intelligible names for her modern offspring. By bright Aurora, I can't go on worshipping at your floral shrine if the ritual is polyglot gibberish, and what's more, I won't, Ma'am. In the word (queerly spelt) of which you seem very fond, I earnestly say, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various
... it is true that a great portion of the human race, especially in the big polyglot empires and the smaller states of Europe, are groaning under the incubus of the language difficulty, and have to spend years on the study of mere words before they can fit themselves for an active career, then the abolition ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... intellectual offspring of British rule, were gathered together to hear delivered to them in English—the one language in which, as a result of British rule, and by no means the least valuable, Indians from all parts of a vast polyglot country are able to hold converse—the Royal message throwing open to the people of India the road to Swaraj within the British Empire, the imperial city of Delhi went into mourning as a sign of angry protest, and the vast majority of its citizens, mostly, it must be remembered, Mahomedans, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... paroxysm of gratitude, regardless of her powder and chalk, which came off upon his coat and yellow beard in patches of white as he kissed her on both cheeks, calling her by every endearing name that occurred to his polyglot memory, from Sweetheart in English to Little Cabbage in French, till Cordova laughed and pushed him away, and made a tremendous ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... things had been bred a certain contempt for his own people—a contempt which he had made it a custom to conceal, but which now burst forth in a polyglot whirlwind of curses upon the heads of Kah-Chucte and Gowhee. They cringed before him like a brace of snarling wolf dogs, too cowardly to spring, too wolfish to cover their fangs. They were not handsome ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... pink and purple and dripping diamonds, and on some of the trees was the delicate green of a second blossoming, like hope in the heart of age. They could scarcely refrain from betraying their exultation to the Hotel des Tourterelles, from which they had concealed their sufferings. But the polyglot population seething round its malodorous stairs and tortuous corridors remained ignorant that anything was passing in the life of these faded old creatures, and even on the day of drawing lots for the Wig the exuberant ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... dragoman. Thus my impedimenta were not numerous. The firman was an order to all Egyptian officials for assistance; the cook was dirty and incapable; and the interpreter was nearly ignorant of English, although a professed polyglot. With this small beginning, Africa was before me, and thus I commenced the search for the Nile sources. Absurd as this may appear, it was a correct commencement. Ignorant of Arabic, I could not have commanded a large ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... Chechenses could think of to head an address to a distinguished Russian general whose gallantry in battle had won their respect. The serpent, in the Caucasus, is the Cardinal Mezzofanti of the brute world. To know as many languages as a serpent is the ne plus ultra of polyglot erudition. A swaggering coward is compared to a drunken mouse; and many a boaster on the porch of the Caucasian village mosque has been silenced by some sceptical bystander with the well-known quotation from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... distinction she regarded as flattering and aristocratic, and I fear she accented it still more by discussing with Mrs. Randolph the merits of the shopkeepers' wares in schoolgirl French before them. She was unfortunate enough, however, to do this in the shop of a polyglot German. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... always furnished to a shipped man by the boarding masters, no matter how he has been shipped. To his surprise, as he attacked the dinner, he found Quincy and Benson, each with a similar outfit of tinware, toying with the food, and paying no attention to the polyglot discourse of the other men regarding the ship, the mates, and the food. But they glared menacingly at ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... The polyglot disturbance that ensued baffles all description. Indeed, I should be puzzled to say exactly what took place, or after how many commands, defiances, threats, protestations, insults, and explanations, a semblance of peace was finally ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... a-swearing and a-praying as they went in more tongues than were babbled at Babel Tower; in other words, on the day when the never-to-be-broken Hindenburg line was broken through and through, a battalion of one of the infantry regiments of this same polyglot division formed a little individual ground swell in the first ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... Brothers. Moreover, Crawfurd had met him frequently at the Jockey Club in Paris, and there was his name on White's books for any one to read. A man of forty-five perhaps, clean-shaven, well set up, an inveterate globe-trotter, a prince among raconteurs, and the most astounding polyglot I have ever met. I myself have heard him talk Eskimo with one of Peary's natives, and he had collated some of his researches into Iranic-Turanian root-forms for the Philological Society. But let us ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... long windows that looked out upon the polyglot of Second Avenue, which even then, over a not quite abandoned elegance, was donning its Joseph's coat of seventeen nationalities and dining, bartering, and gesticulating ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... monotony of people's lives and minds. There is a lasting bond among schoolfellows because no one can become a boy again and have a new set of playmates. There is a persistent comradeship with one's countrymen, especially abroad, because seldom is a man pliable and polyglot enough to be at home among foreigners, or really to understand them. There is an inevitable comradeship with men of the same breeding or profession, however bad these may be, because habits soon monopolise the man. Nevertheless a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... word often repeated, the word Huatinmio, began to enter largely into their conversation, and piqued the curiosity of the historiographer. Marcoy begged the interpreter to procure him the explanation of this perpetual shibboleth. Half by signs, half in the polyglot jargon which he had been employing with the Siriniris, Garcia managed to understand that the word in question was the name of their village, situated at a small distance and in a direction which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... Maldives as "the Light of Asia." Four hundred miles further and your good ship approaches Colombo. The great breakwater, whose first stone was laid by Albert Edward, is penetrated at last, and the polyglot and universal harbor of call unfolds ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... to a half-dozen nationalities possessed in common—these, and their common humanity together with the laws to which it is subject. But aside from this, their speech, habits, customs, religions, food, and pastimes were polyglot; on this account the lines of racial demarkation were apt, at times, to be drawn all too sharply. Yet this very fact of differentiation provided hundreds of others—farmers, shopkeepers, jobbers, machinists, mechanics, blacksmiths, small restaurant-keepers, pool and billiard room ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... from the Montpellier Archives, and published by M. Saint Rene Taillandier, one wonders how this friend of Mme. de Stael, of Sismondi, of Mme. de Souza, this hostess of Moore, of Lamartine, of Lady Morgan, of every sort of French, English, German, Russian, or polyglot creature of distinction that travelled through Italy in the early part of this century, could ever have been the beloved of Alfieri, the misanthropic correspondent of a lot of Sienese ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... mocking-bird — better the echo-bird, with a voice compounded of all sweet sounds, as the blossom of the Chinese olive is compounded of all sweet scents — is a pure lyrist; its throat is a lyre — Aeolian, capricious, many-stringed; as its name suggests, it is a polyglot mime, a bird linguist, a feathered Mezzofanti singing all the bird languages; yet over and above all this, with a something of its own that cannot be described." The mocking-bird speaks for himself in ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... springing to his feet. His chains clattered as he rose, while he drew himself as far as they permitted from the quarter whence the voice appeared to proceed. His fear in some degree communicated itself to Captain Dalgetty, who began to repeat, in a sort of polyglot gibberish, all the exorcisms he had ever heard of, without being able to remember more than a word or two ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... salaries are to be paid by Germany, who will, however, have no voice in fixing them, If the Commission is to discharge adequately its numerous functions, it will be necessary for it to establish a vast polyglot bureaucratic organization, with a staff of hundreds. To this organization, the headquarters of which will be in Paris, the economic destiny of Central Europe is to ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... somewhere were accordingly inevitable and natural, and the late sessions in the wondrous troisieme, the lovely home, when men dropped in and the picture composed more suggestively through the haze of tobacco, of music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot, were on a principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings and the afternoons. Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned back and smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than even the liveliest of these occasions. They were occasions of discussion, none the ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... the house, followed by the polyglot curses of Barlasch, who was now endeavouring to find his bayonet amidst his ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... voice Should say "These verses polyglot Are not so bad," I should rejoice; But oh, my publishers would not! * * * * * And I, though shy and unanointed, Should ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... ports and put to sea with queer cargoes—cargoes that smelled sweet and spicy, with the spice of the far South Seas. Office sailor though he was, Blair Elliston commanded the respect of even the roughest of his polyglot crews—a respect not ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... fate was not so tragic, was the learned Arias Montanus, a Spaniard, who produced at the command of King Philip II. the famous Polyglot Bible printed at Antwerp in nine tomes. He possessed a wonderful knowledge of several languages, and devoted immense labour to his great work. But in spite of the royal approval of his work his book met with much opposition on the part of the extreme Roman party, who accused ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... of such a briery tangle, that rollicking polyglot, the yellow-breasted chat, loves to hide its nest. Indeed, many birds can say with Br'er Rabbit that they were "bred en bawn in a brier-patch." Throughout the eastern half of the United $tates and Upper Canada the catbrier displays its insignificant little blossoms from April ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of tongues would have ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the velveteen-coated, wide-awaked loafers, the filthy tatterdemalions of all nations and their womenkind would have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... a chap to crack up my 'Polyglot Pickle' in proper literary style. None of your commonplace maunderings, but something smart and startling. What do you say? Can you ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... rate upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against bullets, the natural reflection in dark hearts of the blind chance which since the introduction of firearms seemed to decide ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... discursive in his mode of treating them. The prodigious fecundity of the author of a hundred volumes, the varied acquisitions of the philosopher, the historian, the satirist, the moralist, give diversity to his subjects, and an endless variety to his ideas. He possessed, as it were, a polyglot mind; he threw himself into the feelings and passions of every country and every age, and brought out in his dramas part at least of the inexhaustible store of human thoughts and events which have from the beginning of time agitated the human race. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... all proportion to the probable loss by failure. So when Napoleon least expected it they determined to act, and caught him napping. The defences of Antwerp had been left incomplete. There was no army to meet the blow—nothing but a polyglot rabble without staff or even officers. For a week at least success was in our hands. Napoleon's fleet only escaped by twenty-four hours, and yet the failure was not only complete but disastrous. Still so entirely were the causes ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... the Morning Post had just announced. Mrs. Miles, whose delicious every other Wednesdays in Montague Square are supposed by some to be rival entertainments to Mrs. Newcome's alternate Thursdays in Bryanstone Square, pinched her daughter Mira, engaged in a polyglot conversation with Herr Schnurr, nor Carabossi, the guitarist, and Monsieur Pivier, the celebrated French chess-player, to point out the Boyar. Mira Miles wished she knew a little Moldavian, not so much that she might speak it, but that she might be heard ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Swedes, and occasionally, swarthy Italians and beady-eyed, voluble Jews. Sooner or later, they all lost themselves in the winding gravel paths of the park, or made their way to the broad walk along the lake front, where the air was filled with their polyglot babel. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... at the end of the third. An amiable young signal-officer who had been at his telephone some thirty kilometres away when the city was taken and was off at three next morning, sat opposite me and told with great spirit how the only common language between him and some of his polyglot men was the English he had learned in school and they ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... never find their way to these isles, for which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. Bree—and chief among them the dark Orpheus, and the yellow Hippolais, surpassing the black-cap, and almost equalling the nightingale, for richness and variety of song—the polyglot warbler which penetrates, in summer, as far north as the shores of the British Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty miles of sea, after a land journey—and by night, too, as all the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... of the World," and a whole array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox's "Acts and Monuments" on the other,—an odd collection, as folios from lower shelves are ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Here, too, while he ought to have been studying law, he was claiming acquaintance with gipsies, bruisers, and shady characters, such as the notorious Thurtell. A more dangerous influence to Borrow than any, perhaps, was that of Sir John Bowring, a plausible polyglot, who deliberately used his facility in acquiring and translating tongues as a ladder to an administrative post abroad. Borrow, as was perhaps natural, put a wrong construction upon his sympathy, and his apparently disinterested ambition to leave no poetic fragment in Russian, Swedish, ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... They did not belong to the personally conducted party, of course—Miss Winchelsea had seen to that—but they travelled with it because of the convenience of that arrangement. The people were the oddest mixture, and wonderfully amusing. There was a vociferous red-faced polyglot personal conductor in a pepper-and-salt suit, very long in the arms and legs and very active. He shouted proclamations. When he wanted to speak to people he stretched out an arm and held them until his ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the elevator she turned with hasty step toward the office where sat the hotel clerk, pen in hand. He listened with obsequious mien, like a polyglot quick to understand each of his guests, and coming out from his enclosure he made straight toward Jaime, who, still embarrassed by his unsuccessful venture, was pretending to read the advertisements in the vestibule. Febrer at first ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... d'une femme mariee," which were virtuous to dulness and interested her not at all, in a listless hand, long and delicate like her feet, and decorated with too many turquoise rings. Below, in the cabin, she could hear the noise of the men as they argued and shouted at each other in a polyglot of ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... vast polyglot nation, faces economic development problems stemming from recent acts of terrorism, unequal resource distribution among regions, endemic corruption, the lack of reliable legal recourse in contract disputes, weaknesses in the banking system, ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Russian and Polish to Prince Volkonski, with the same volubility as if he had been speaking his native tongue.' As a last trial, the baron suddenly accosted him in Walachian, when, 'without hesitation, and without appearing to remark what an out-of-the-way dialect had been taken, away went the polyglot with equal volubility;' and Zach adds, that he even knew the Zingller or gipsy language, which had long proved a puzzle to himself. Molbech, a Danish traveller, who had an interview with him in 1820, adds to his account of this ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... for at the end of each sentence, cheers, faint as the roar of waters on a far-off strand, floated towards me; and if I am to believe a report of the proceedings subsequently shown us, I must have become polyglot in my cups. According to that report it seems the Governor threw off (I wonder he did not do something else), with the Queen's health in French: to which I responded in the same language. Then ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... and women, evidently belonged to the educated, or rather to the cultured class. Their speech, which seemed to change with perfect ease from one language to another in the course of their somewhat polyglot converse, was the easy flowing speech of men and women accustomed to the best society, not only in the social but the intellectual sense ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... title. But Dana's Seaman's Friend is known in England under the name of The Seaman's Manual. Technicalities change so much more slowly afloat than ashore that even the ultra-modern editions of Paasch's magnificent polyglot dictionary, From Keel to Truck, still contain many nautical terms which will help the reader out ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... came to the Cameroons, where he learned German. His family was now in the Brazils, where no doubt they were learning Portuguese; but he himself had found a very good job here. He was saving money to go to England. He seemed to have no roots, as it were. I wondered, as I have often wondered of other polyglot people I have met, how much of any language they really know, which language do they think in? They always seem to me to resemble those lumps of floating grass one sees in the Gulf Stream, forever drifting onward, footless and fruitless to the end. They never seem to ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... keep at a distance that insistent melancholy that seems to have been for ever hovering about him, and the tempter whispered "Languages." {21a} One day chance led him to a bookstall whereon lay a polyglot dictionary, "which pretended to be an easy guide to the acquirement of French, Italian, Low Dutch, and English." He took the two first, and when he had gleaned from the old volume all it had to teach him, he longed for a ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... give and bequeath to Sir John Hawkins, one of my Executors, the Annales Ecclesiastici of Baronius, and Holinshed's and Stowe's Chronicles, and also an octavo Common Prayer-Book. To Bennet Langton, Esq. I give and bequeath my Polyglot Bible. To Sir Joshua Reynolds, my great French Dictionary, by Martiniere, and my own copy of my folio English Dictionary, of the last revision. To Dr. William Scott, one of my Executors, the Dictionnaire de Commerce, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... Yet a very large number of those who have gone home to Europe have returned to America with bride or family. As a result the larger cities of the United States are congeries of foreign quarters, whose alarming fecundity fills the streets with progeny and whose polyglot chatter on pay night turns even many a demure New England town into ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... no judge of the philology, but every human being is a divinely appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems to me to prove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians; it was an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts of people of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel: suppose some great prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa. The prophet himself might be a simple or unlettered man. But no one who knows the modern world would ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... liberal sentiments over the Continent; on their mental tablets, the names of Russia, Austria, and the Pope, are inscribed in red ink. I have heard some of them talk vigorous sense—yea, I have been present at polyglot discussions in the old, oak-lined dining-room at Hunsden Wood, where a singular insight was given of the sentiments entertained by resolute minds respecting old northern despotisms, and old southern superstitions: also, I have heard much twaddle, enounced ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell |
