"Vowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... with vowels, and we easily learnt to pronounce it: But found it exceedingly difficult to teach them to pronounce a single word of ours; probably not only from its abounding in consonants, but from some peculiarity in its structure; for Spanish and Italian words, if ending in a vowel, they pronounced ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... sentence. In the treatment of individual words, written and spoken Latin developed along different lines. In English we make little distinction between the quantity of vowels, but in Latin of course a given vowel was either long or short, and literary tradition became so fixed in this matter that the professional poets of the Augustan age do not tolerate any deviation from it. There are indications, however, that the common people did not observe the rules of ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... 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 was Anna Maria ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... every line even of the blank verse in all the twenty-two tragedies of Alfieri ends femininely, that is, with an unaccented eleventh syllable. In all Italian rhyme there is thus always a double rhyme, the final syllable, moreover, invariably ending with a vowel. This, besides being too much rhyme and too much vowel, is, in iambic lines, metrically a defect, the eleventh ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the aspirate, Fuddy-Duddy, the incapable terrapin, came to a dead halt, and before the vowel had died away up the ravine had folded up all his eight legs and lain down in the dusty road, regardless of the effect upon his derned skin. The queer little man slid off his seat to the ground and started ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... other respects, he would never equal him in sweetness; 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 ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... tongues Influence upon Christendom of the Hebrew legends Lucretius's theory of the origin of language The teachings of the Church fathers on this subject The controversy as to the divine origin of the Hebrew vowel points Attitude of the reformers toward this question Of Catholic scholars.—Marini Capellus and his ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... to make it so. This idea is very fully developed and with great wealth of curious Old English illustrations. Under the designation of "tone-color" he treats very suggestively of rhyme, alliteration, and vowel and consonant distribution, showing how the recurrence of euphonic vowels and consonants secures that rich variety of tone-color which music gives in orchestration. The work thus breaks away from the classic grammarian's ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... /Lucillius/ is a mere barbarism, the /l/ being doubled to indicate the long vowel: so we find ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... most sacred of all things, and they partake of the holiness and immutability which belong to the unknown power itself. To misplace a vowel point in copying the sacred books was esteemed a sin by the Rabbis, and a pious Mussulman will not employ the same pen to copy a verse of the Koran and an ordinary letter. There are many Christians who suppose the saying: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Words shall not pass away," has ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... CORRECTION", the point of the tale depends on the difference between an i with a macron (long vowel) and an i with a breve (short vowel) These have been represented as [i] ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... Supreme," by Coralie Austin, is a delicate little poem in which we regret the presence of one inexcusably bad rhyme. To rhyme the words "rose" and "unclosed" is to exceed the utmost limits of poetic license. It is true that considerable variations in vowel sounds have been permitted; "come" makes, or at least used to make, an allowable rhyme with "home", "clock" with "look", or "grass" with "place"; but a final consonant attached to one of two otherwise rhyming ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... is to subordinate details to the general impression that I wish to convey of the peculiarities of different minds, I will simply remark—First, that the persistence of the colour association with sounds is fully as remarkable as that of the Number-Form with numbers. Secondly, that the vowel sounds chiefly evoke them. Thirdly, that the seers are invariably most minute in their description of the precise tint and hue of the colour. They are never satisfied, for instance, with saying "blue," but will take a great deal of trouble to ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... Rhodian? Form and face, Victory's self upsoaring to receive The poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name, Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants, Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end In ion' ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... 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 ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... should be able to express our thoughts not only with unparalleled exactness and subtlety, but also with unequalled variety of sound. Further it is probable that English surpasses the other three great languages of song, German, Italian, and French, in number of distinguishable vowel sounds, but in questions of ear authorities usually differ, and it is hazardous to claim in this an indubitable supremacy. It seems certain, however, that English has rather more than twice as many vowel sounds as Italian (the poorest language in this respect), which has only seven or eight. ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... 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
... if he had been wielding sword and buckler in an opera, and his narrow chest swelled under the tight buttons of his ragged old frock-coat. Every English word he spoke was supplemented by an Italian vowel, so that his language, though it was perfectly fluent and correct, sounded quite foreign. His extraordinary height and leanness made him grotesque to look at, but neither the comicality of his figure nor his theatrical voice and gesture could kill the fact that he was in earnest, and ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... never sounded at any time. Sir James Murray draws attention to the existence of two European types, one like the French cafe, Italian caffe, the other like the English coffee, Dutch koffie. He explains the vowel o in the second series as apparently representing au, from Turkish ahv. This seems unsupported by evidence, and the v is already represented by the ff, so on Sir James's assumption coffee must stand for kahv-ve, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... in the ballad; and precisely the same 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 purer proverbs of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... contained in the Basque language, specimens of some of which will be found below. It is remarkable enough, that in the greater part of the derivatives from the Sanskrit the Basque has dropped the initial consonant, so that the word commences with a vowel. The Basque, indeed, may be said to be almost a vowel language; the number of consonants employed being comparatively few: perhaps eight words out of ten commence and terminate with a vowel, owing to which it is a language to the highest degree soft and melodious, far ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... imagine a better suiting of form and content than in The Singer's Curse. The management of the vowel sequences is truly wonderful and the rhymes carry the emotional words with a fine virtuosity. The Luck of Edenhall, a variation of a Scottish theme and also of the Biblical "Mene tekel," displays without sermonizing ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... which Eve first spoke. This writer is ridiculed in Ben Jonson's Comedies:—he is not without rivals even in the present day! Covarruvias, after others of his school, discovers that when male children are born they cry out with an A, being the first vowel of the word Adam, while the female infants prefer the letter E, in allusion to Eve; and we may add that, by the pinch of a negligent nurse, they may probably learn all their vowels. Of the pedantic triflings of commentators, a controversy ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... about the period of the origin in Egypt of the belief in the existence of an almighty God who was One, the inscriptions show us that this Being was called by a name which was something like Neter, [Footnote: There is no e in Egyptian, and this vowel is added merely to make the word pronounceable.] the picture sign for which was an axe-head, made probably of stone, let into a long wooden handle. The coloured picture character shews that the axe-head was fastened into the handle by thongs of leather or string, and judging ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... [219] The final vowel i would, on the basis of the explanation offered, be paralleled by the i of Igigi—an indication of the plural. See Delitzsch, ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... doubt that 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 Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... require it all," answered the student, with such a mouthful of the vowel, that we might write the word requoire, and not be far ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... have prevented the ascent of Mount Tongariro, which is tapu, or sacred. They are now much better treated than formerly, and send four members to Parliament. In their language there is no s or f, vowels are very numerous, and every word ends with a vowel. The sound of the words, therefore, is easy and flowing, and the native names are far more euphonious than those ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... in a consonant, with a single vowel before it, double the consonants in derivatives; as, ship, shipping, etc. But if ending in a consonant with a double vowel before it, they do not double the consonant in ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... Primary School. She notices with what pleasure her father, perhaps a somewhat exceptional parent, receives and answers letters. She desires to write and her mother makes her say her own name carefully, noticing first the "open" or vowel sounds and then by noting the position of her tongue she finds the closed sounds. As she hears the sound she is shown how to make it. Her father leaves home at the right moment, Lina writes to him, receives and is able to read his answer, printed like her own in Roman capitals. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... forms, Latin-1 and ASCII-7. The only differences are in the way fractions are displayed (as a single character, or as "number/number") and the first vowel in ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... please also to observe that there is not, to the best of my remembrance, one vowel gaping on another for want of a caesura in this whole poem. But where a vowel ends a word the next begins either with a consonant or what is its equivalent; for our w and h aspirate, and our diphthongs, are plainly such. The greatest latitude I take ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... have 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 marked at all. The words would be ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... from Duncan, into the midst of which rushed another from Mrs Catanach, similar, but coarse in vowel and harsh in ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... pines and their fragrance. Squirrels scampered over its roof when it was not preoccupied by woodpeckers, and a printer's devil had once seen a nest-building blue jay enter the composing window, flutter before one of the slanting type-cases with an air of deliberate selection, and then fly off with a vowel ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 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), going apparently further than Welsh in ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... with adult men, as Haller long ago remarked,[6] the sound partakes of the character of the vowels (as pronounced in German) O and A; whilst with children and women, it has more of the character of E and I; and these latter vowel-sounds naturally have, as Helmholtz has shown, a higher pitch than the former; yet both tones of laughter equally ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... example of the attendant gracioso, half servant, half confidant, who appears often in the Spanish drama. The Spanish playwright did not confine himself to one form of verse; and Mr. MacCarthy, in his adequate translation, has followed the various forms of Calderon, only not attempting the assonant vowel, so hard to escape in Spanish, and still harder to reproduce in English. These selections give no impression of the amazing invention of Calderon. This can only be appreciated through reading 'The Constant ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... 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 a fresh ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gamester who does not immediately pay his losings, is said to vowel the winner, by repeating the vowels I. O. U. or perhaps from giving his note for the money according to the Irish form, where the acknowledgment of the debt is expressed by the letters I. O. U. which, the sum and name of the debtor being added, is deemed a sufficient ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... 60 per cent of the vowels are short, and since short vowels outnumber long vowels by about four to one, they are taught first. Teach one vowel at a time by combining with the known consonants. And what fun it is, when short "a" is introduced, to blend it with the consonants and listen to discover "word sounds." Henceforth the children will take delight in "unlocking" ...
— How to Teach Phonics • Lida M. Williams
... are his theories, he must have abjured them the moment that he set to work composing. In Oper und Drama, for example, he has a very interesting discussion on the value of consonants in the German language and on the characteristic difference between the expression of the consonant and that of the vowel, arriving at the conclusion that alliteration is better suited for the German musical drama than the imported rime. Further, he shows—rather convincingly, I think—that the true subject for the drama is mythical. But not long after this he wrote Tristan und Isolde, in which alliteration is ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... symbolism those of poetic instrumentation. For according to M. Ghil and his organ Les Ecrits pour l'Art, it would appear that the syllables of the French language evoke in us the sensations of different colours; consequently the timbre of the different instruments. The vowel u corresponds to the colour yellow, and therefore to the sound of flutes. Arthur Rimbaud was, it is true, first in the field with these pleasant and genial theories; but M. Ghil informs us that ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... figurative, by which they designate, seldom very appropriately, some object for which they have no positive name. Engro properly means a fellow, and engri, which is the feminine or neuter modification, a thing. When the noun or verb terminates in a vowel, engro is turned into mengro, and engri into mengri. I have already shown how, by affixing engro to kaun, the Gypsies have invented a word to express a hare. In like manner, by affixing engro to pov, earth, ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... their favourite quotation. It always gave President Boomer a chance to speak of the final letter "m" in Latin poetry, and to say that in his opinion the so-called elision of the final "m" was more properly a dropping of the vowel with a repercussion of the two last consonants. He supported this by quoting Ammianus, at which Dr. Boyster exclaimed, "Pooh! Ammianus: more dog Latin!" and appealed to Mr. Tomlinson as to whether any rational man nowadays cared what ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... the interest of the situation, without interrupting the action. I have therefore refrained from interrupting the actor in the fervor of his dialogue by introducing the accustomed tedious ritournelle; nor have I broken his phrase at an opportune vowel that the flexibility of his voice might be exhibited in a lengthy flourish; nor have I written phrases for the orchestra to afford the singer opportunity to take a long breath preparatory to the accepted flourish; ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... teach us, and were much delighted when we 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 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... always represented by the Italic letter e. It has also a third power, as in the words Yes, Yell, etc., which is retained every where in the Vocabulary, at least in the beginning of words, or when it goes before another vowel, unless directed to be sounded separately by a mark over it, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... method of another, but to seek out her own peculiar, strange processes. Thus, for example, she—like many children, however,—learned writing before reading. Not she herself, meek and yielding by nature, but some peculiar quality of her mind, obstinately refused in reading to harness a vowel alongside of a consonant, or vice versa; in writing, however, she would manage this. For penmanship along slanted rulings she, despite the general wont of beginners, felt a great inclination; she wrote bending low over the paper; blew on the paper from exertion, as though blowing ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... spoken neither in Scotch nor English, but in Gaelic—which, were I able to write 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 ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... humming tone as indicated in the first lesson, and maintain the same focus while forming certain elements. Take the syllable n-o-m, allowing no break while going from n, the nares sound, to the vowel sound of o, and returning to the nares sound of m. This is perhaps the best element to begin upon, because of its definiteness, but the same principle can be applied to other elements of speech, as Most-men-want-poise-and-more- royal-margin. Form each ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... 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 ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... in the Y.M.C.A. huts where the padre toils and the layman sweats day and night for the well-being of the soldier men. In some of the huts it is actually possible to get a bath. It is always possible to get dry. 'Twas Black Jack Vowel, good friend Jack, who wrote over to tell us that there was no hut at one time ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... 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 ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... 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 her to use her pencil ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... fashion, came the trials of "planting time." This was such an unfragrant and expensive period that I pass over it as briefly as possible. I saw it was necessary in conformity with the appalling situation to alter one vowel in my Manorial Hall. The haul altogether amounted to eighteen loads besides a hundred bags of vilely smelling fertilizers. Agents for every kind of phosphates crowded around me, descanting on the needs of the old land, until I began to comprehend ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... presented from 'copies' and are therefore full of errors, which are due for the most part, doubtless, to the copyist and not to the sculptor. It is not difficult, however, in most cases under consideration here, to restore the correct reading. Usually only vowel signs are omitted or misread and, here, and there, consonants closely resembling one another as va and cha, va, and dha, ga and ['s]a, la and na ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... himself, and of dividing the long day into stages of interest, without neglecting business. This ingenious invention, remarkable, like many great discoveries, for its simplicity, consisted in varying the first vowel in the word "paper," and substituting, in its stead, at different periods of the day, all the other vowels in grammatical succession. Thus, before daylight in the winter-time, he went to and fro, in his little oilskin cap and cape, and his big comforter, piercing the ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... the observance of a varying 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 single ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... the author calls them, nothing more—pure and simple records of the life of the people around him, their loves and griefs, their hopes and disappointments. The most usual metre is the simple Spanish asonante, or eight-syllable trochaic verse, with the vowel rhyme called asonante.[2] They are pervaded by a tender spirit of melancholy, very different from the Weltschmerz of Heine, with some of whose lyrics the Spanish poet's cantares may be compared without losing anything by the comparison. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... form 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
... Island, whose name is Oree. He had not been long on board before he and I exchanged Names, and we afterwards address'd each other accordingly.* (* The Tahitians called Cook Tootee, which was their idea of the sound of his name, with a vowel termination, none of their words ending in a consonant.) At noon the North end of the Island bore South by East 1/2 East, distant 72 Leagues. Latitude observed, 16 degrees 40 minutes South. Three other Islands in sight, namely, Ulietea, ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... Mars, made when the city had been a seaport. They located the city, and learned that its name had been Kukan—or something with a similar vowel-consonant ratio. Immediately, Sid Chamberlain and Gloria Standish began giving their telecasts a Kukan dateline, and Hubert Penrose used the name in his official reports. They also found a Martian ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... contains a few characters that will only display correctly in utf-8 (unicode) encoding: {MODIFIER LETTER SMALL G} small raised g a a with macron ("long" mark) a i o vowel with breve ("short" mark) ' ' "forward" and "backward" apostrophes All letters shown are rare. The words in which they appear are listed at the end of the file, before the Errata, ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona in 1881 • James Stevenson
... 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 ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... vary according to the grammatical signification of the word. The relations of grammar are thus expressed for the most part by changes of vocalic sound, just as in English the plural of "man" is denoted by a change in the vowel. The verb is but imperfectly developed; it is, in fact, rather a noun than a verb, expressing relation rather than time. Compound words, moreover, are rare, the compounds of our European languages being replaced in the Semitic dialects by ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... highest degree of respect. 2. Bitter hatred. 3. A common and useful covering for the floor. 4. A model of excellence. 5. A woman's name. 6. A sharp instrument. 7. A curved structure. 8. Congealed water. 9. An adverb. 10. A vowel. ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... possessive pronouns; u-re, I, me; eu-re, thou, 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 ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... No vowel must ever be prolonged unnaturally, no word of mine must ever change into a mere musical note, no singer of my words must ever cease to be a ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... 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 called to answer a summons); recreation, ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... years later. They consist[4] of fifteen complete plays, which I believe to be the largest amount of translated verse by any one author, that has ever appeared in English. Most of it is in the difficult assonant or vowel rhyme, hardly ever previously attempted in our language. This may be a fitting place to cite a few testimonies as to the execution of the work. Longfellow, whom I have myself heard speak of the "Autos" in a way that showed how deeply he had studied them in the original, ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... fluctuating and evanescent that they go for comparatively little in questions of Etymology. Tan is equivalent to T—n; the place of the dash being filled by any vowel. T is readily replaced by th or d, and n by ng; as is known to every Philological student. The object, which in English we call tin, and its name, are peculiar and important in this connection, as combining ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the end of a word, except in monosyllables that have no other vowel, as the; or proper names, as Penelope, Phebe, Derbe; being used to modify the foregoing consonants, as since, once, hedge, oblige; or to lengthen the preceding vowel, as b[)a]n, b[a]ne; c[)a]n, c[a]ne; p[)i]n, p[i]ne; t[)u]n, t[u]ne; ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... the story one has to slur over the pronunciation of "Paradise," making the last vowel short, so as to explain the misunderstanding about "Paris." I have retained the Paris motif as all through the Middle Ages, wayfarers from and to Paris (wandering scholars or clerics) would be familiar sights to the peasantry ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... we mean the pronunciation approved by a standard dictionary. Elegance and refinement of speech depend largely on the correct pronunciation of the vowel sounds. The vowel a, which is sounded in seven different ways in the English language, presents the greatest difficulty. Many people recognize at most, only the sound of a in at, ate, all, far, and mortal respectively. They ignore the sound as in air, and ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... justified in accepting Hartmann's theory of the collective suicide of mankind, and in throwing a "bloody spittle of contempt" at life. A "bloody spittle," as is known from Arthur Rimbaud's sonnets on consonants, stands before the eyes of everyone who pronounces the vowel i, just as the vowel a brings up the picture of "black, shaggy flies, which ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... in the locative case, the final vowel indicating to the locative having been dropped for sandhi. Niravishan is an adverb, equivalent to samyak-abhinivesam kurvan. Tattadeva means "those and those" i.e., possessions, such as putradaradikam. Kusalan is sarasaravivekanipunan. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... as in it. She took the child's finger and placed it upon the windpipe so that she might feel the vibration there, put her finger between her teeth to show her how wide apart they were, and one finger in the mouth to feel the tongue, and then sounded the vowel. The child grasped the idea at once. Her fingers flew to her own mouth and throat, and she produced the sound so nearly accurate that it sounded like an echo. Next the sound of ah was made by dropping the jaw a little and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... for users whose text readers cannot use the "real" (Unicode/UTF-8) version. In the Latin text, the "oe" diphthong is shown as [oe] to distinguish it from the two-vowel sequence "oe" ("coeuntia"). The asterism used in the advertising ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... part to 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 to distinguish between a whistle, a little bell, and the clapping of the ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... could not;—but because there may be syntactical likenesses, or the changes and assimilations of sounds may be governed by the same laws. Thus in Turkic—I draw upon the Encyclopaedia Britannica—there is a suffix z, preceded by a vowel, to mean your: pederin is 'father'; 'your father' becomes pederiniz; dostun means 'friend'; 'your friend' becomes not dostuniz, but dostunus; and this trick of assimilating the vowel of the suffix is the last one in the stem is an example of the kind of similarities which establish ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the yellow sand, and the great plain shimmered and glowed until they felt as if they were riding over a cooling sheet of molten metal. Their lips were parched and dried, and their tongues like tags of leather. They lisped curiously in their speech, for it was only the vowel sounds which would come without an effort. Miss Adams's chin had dropped upon her chest, and her great hat concealed ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... Bettys, have passed away, and in their stead we hear of Lowinys, and Orchistrys, Philenys, Alminys, Cytherys, Sarahlettys, Amindys, Marindys, &c. &c. &c. All these last appellations terminate properly with an a, but this unfortunate vowel, when a final letter, being popularly pronounced like y, we have adapted our spelling to the sound, which produces a complete bathos to all these flights ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... we butterflies were gone, were laboriously ardent. Many thoughts that occupied the later years of my friend were caught from the small utterance of that toy. Thence came his inquiries into the roots of articulate language and the foundations of literary art; his papers on vowel-sounds, his papers in the Saturday Review upon the laws of verse, and many a strange approximation, many a just note, thrown out in talk and now forgotten. I pass over dozens of his interests, and dwell on this trifling matter of the phonograph, because ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... for all gentlemen to read and most necessary to remember," was itself an antithesis; the discourses it contains were framed upon the same plan; the sentences are grouped antithetically; while the antithesis is pointed by an equally elaborate repetition of ideas, of vowel sounds and of consonant sounds. Letters, syllables, words, sentences, sentence groups, paragraphs, all are employed for the purpose of producing the antithetical style now known as euphuism. An example will serve to make the matter clearer. Philautus, upbraiding his treacherous ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... notwithstanding its division into syllables by the organs of articulation—lips, tongue, etc.—should pour forth smoothly and uninterruptedly. The full value of each tone must be allotted to the vowel; the consonants which precede or end the syllables are pronounced quickly and distinctly. In declamatory singing, on the contrary, the consonants should be articulated with greater ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... he found means, though his sight was gone, to ascertain whether his rules had been carried out by his printer; and in itself this fact justifies a facsimile reprint. What the principle in the use of the double vowel exactly was (and it is found to affect the other monosyllabic pronouns) it is not so easy to discover, though roughly it is clear the reduplication was intended to mark emphasis. For example, in the speech of the Divine Son after the battle in heaven (vi. 810-817) the pronouns ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... yourself of this, repeat the vowels loudly and clearly without stopping to think about the position of the mouth, and notice how your lips, the tip and base of your tongue, and your soft palate and throat all change their positions for each successive vowel. ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... the music 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 Of powerful instruments:—the gorgeous dyes, The space, the splendour ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... favors the murder of new-born children in order to save their souls; another enjoins ghastly bodily mutilations for a similar purpose; others still would plunge the world in flames and blood for the difference of a phrase in a creed, or a vowel in a name, or a finger more or less in making the sign of the cross, or for this garment in a ritual, or that gesture ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... (Ducas, c. 35) are derived from the natural language of children; and it may be observed, that all such primitive words which denote their parents, are the simple repetition of one syllable, composed of a labial or a dental consonant and an open vowel, (Des Brosses, Mechanisme des Langues, tom. i. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... it advisable to follow the usage of the Authorised Version, and not to insert the word uniformly in place of "LORD" or "GOD," which words when printed in small capitals represent the words substituted by Jewish custom for the ineffable Name according to the vowel points by which it is distinguished. To this usage the Revisers have steadily adhered with the exception of a very few passages in which the introduction of a proper name seemed to be required. In this ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... leading to the points of the leading sled. At 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 as ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... 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
... Denis, giving at the same time the same sound to the vowel, u, as it obtains when occurring in ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... De Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds. ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... student of the Hebrew language is aware that we have in the conjugation of our verbs a mode known as the 'intensive voice,' which, by means of an almost imperceptible modification of vowel-points, intensifies the meaning of the primitive root. A similar significance seems to attach to the Jews themselves in connection with the people among whom they dwell. They are the 'intensive form' of any nationality whose language ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... 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
... italics; words 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
... 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; ...
— Silver Links • Various
... And the vowel i by bringing the jaws still closer to one another, and stretching the two corners of the mouth towards ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... alphabetized as "ae". The letter I is alphabetized according to its phonetic value, vowel before consonant. J is not used. Thorn / and eth (capital does not occur) are alphabetized as "th". The letters U and V are shown with the form used in their source documents, but are alphabetized by phonetic ...
— A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - From A.D. 1150 To 1580 • A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat
... "Spadacrene Anglica" the original title-page and initial letters have been artistically reproduced by the publishers; the text has not been modernized except in the case of the old vowel forms I and U for the consonants J and V. Otherwise, the original spelling and the use of capitals and italics have been retained. The long S has not been retained. With these slight changes one cannot but admire the forceful English in which ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... trifle alarmed when she read in his next letter that some of them were not half bad-looking, surprisingly well groomed for so far West, and fairly attractive till they opened their mouths. Then, he said, they twanged the banjo at every vowel and went over the letter "r" as if it were a bump in the road. He had no desire for blinders, but he said that he would derive comfort from a pair of ear-muffs. By and by he was writing her not to be worried about losing ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... 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, and ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... and so acted the dogs that Pouchskin was driving—all five suddenly coming to a dead stop! Pouchskin endeavoured to urge them forward—crying out the usual signal, Ha; but, in his anxious eagerness, Pouchskin placed the accent after the vowel, instead of before it; and instead of Ha! his exclamation sounded Ah! The latter being the command for the dogs to halt, of course only kept them steady in their places; and they stood without offering to move ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... he himself appears to admit that the compositor, 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 what ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... the case of 'leap,' which has two preterite-forms, both employed by Shelley (See for an example of the longer form, the "Hymn to Mercury", 18 5, where 'leaped' rhymes with 'heaped' (line 1). The shorter form, rhyming to 'wept,' 'adapt,' etc., occurs more frequently.)—one with the long vowel of the present-form, the other with a vowel-change (Of course, wherever this vowel-shortening takes place, whether indicated by a corresponding change in the spelling or not, "t", not "ed" is properly used—'cleave,' 'cleft,'; 'deal,' 'dealt'; etc. The forms discarded under the general rule ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... englutema. Voracity engluteco. Vortex turnakvo, turnigxado. Vote vocxdoni, baloti. Vouch garantii, atesti. Voucher garantio, garantianto, atesto. Vow dedicxi, promesi. Vow (religious) religia promeso. Vowel vokala. Voyage vojagxo, vojiro. Vulgar vulgara. Vulgarise vulgarigi. Vulgarity vulgareco. Vulgate Latina Biblio. Vulnerable vundebla. Vulture ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... or note the vowel-peals throughout the passage, now shut and anon opened by the scheme of consonants; now continuous, anon modulated by delicate pauses; always chiming obediently to the strain of thought; then I hold that if we have not actual counterpoint ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... this instrument every sound struck on the keys represents a certain vowel-consonant sound. Thus the listener hears the sounds more distinctly than we hear ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... not comprehend this then. And so I fashioned my apt phrases, and weighed my synonyms, and echoed this or that vowel very skilfully, I thought, and alliterated my consonants with discretion. In fine, I did not overlook the most meticulous device of the stylist; and I enjoyed it. It was a sort of game; and they taught me at least, those six delightful ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... entirely of consonants, the vowel sounds having always been inserted orally, and never marked in writing until the "vowel points," as they are called, were invented by the Masorites, some six centuries after the Christian era. As the vowel sounds were originally ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... 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
... where a new word to express a new idea is made by combining two or more old words, or by changing the vowel of one word, or by changing the ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell
... 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, ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... 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
... whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish; but charity never faileth. And when all our "dialects" on both sides of the water shall vanish, and we shall speak no more Yorkshire or Cape Cod, or London cockney or "Pike" or "Cracker" vowel flatness, nor write them any more, but all use the noble simplicity of the ideal English, and not indulge in such odd-sounding phrases as this of our critic that "the combatants on both sides were by way of detesting each other," though we speak with ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Sanscrit manuscripts, highly ornamented and richly illumined, some of them written in letters of gold and silver on a black ground. Many of them illustrated with the neatest miniature paintings of the Hindu gods and saints. Two Korans, the letters entirely of gold, with the vowel points in black. The two versions of Pilpais or Bedpai's fables, by Hussein Vaiz and Abulfazl, illustrated with upwards of 700 highly finished miniatures; the best historical works in the Persian language, finely written, and ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... generally avoiding the difficult U, and the 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 ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... shape. Have you ever heard a real ingrowing Englishman start a word in the roof of his mouth and then back away from it as if it was red-hot and had prickles on it? It's interesting. They seem to think it is indecent to come brazenly out and sound a vowel. ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... real enjoyment to the fresh young voices raised again and again in song. There was, however, something so curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly funny, in "The Old Oaken Bucket," from lips that have difficulty with the vowel sounds of English; from children that never saw a well and never will see one;—and I was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling about "I love thy templed hills," etc., in that patriotic Plymouth ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... the actuality of the performance puts it beyond all contradiction. With his tongue he'd so vowel you out as smooth Italian as any man breathing; with his eye he would sparkle forth the proud Spanish; with his nose blow out most robustious Dutch; the creaking of his high-heeled shoe would articulate exact Polonian; the knocking of his shinbone feminine French; and his belly would ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... with Chaucer's use of forms which are now obsolete—more especially of inflexions of verbs and substantives (including several instances of the famous final e), and contractions with the negative ne and other monosyllabic words ending in a vowel, of the initial syllables of words beginning with vowels or with the letter h. These and other variations from later usage in spelling and pronunciation—such as the occurrence of an e (sometimes sounded and sometimes not) at the ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... 23, so that all the letters indicated, in whatever order they may come, are within the compass of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Next, the numbers most frequently repeated, if we except the noughts, are 5 and 20, which occur seven times each. Now, the vowel most frequently occurring in average English writing is e, and you will at once perceive that e is number five in the alphabet, counting from the beginning. More, if we go on counting so, we shall find that 20 is t, which is one of the most frequently occurring consonants. This ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... occur as early as the seventh week, but usually not till the end of the first half year. Tones are understood before words, and vowel sounds before consonants, so that if the vowel sounds alone are given of a word which the child understands (thirteen months), it will understand as well as if the word were fully spoken. Many children before they are six months old will repeat words parrot-like by mere imitation, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Christians and to any others who cannot read, but who take enough of an interest in Christianity to desire to read the Scriptures for themselves. By the use of seventeen of these letters we can express every consonant and vowel sound in the Amoy dialect, and by the use of a few additional marks we can designate all the tones. Dr. James Young, an English Presbyterian missionary physician, has commenced teaching the colloquial, as written with the Roman alphabet, in his school, ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... dropped the k sound in initial kn, as in knave, still sounded in Ger. Knabe, boy. French gets over the difficulty by inserting a vowel between the two consonants, e.g., canif is a Germanic word cognate with Eng. knife. This is a common device in French when a word of Germanic origin begins with two consonants. Cf. Fr. derive, drift, Eng. ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... hare. An was formerly used before words beginning with h, even when that letter was sounded, and also before words beginning with a vowel. ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... syllables from five to seven, until the close, which was an extra seven syllable line. Other rules there were none. Rhyme, quantity, accent, stress were disregarded. Two vowels together must never be sounded as a diphthong, and a long vowel counts for two syllables, likewise a final "n", and the consonant "m" ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... Letters of 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 ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... 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 ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... it necessary to suppress a syllable in order to make the rhythm more nearly perfect. Syllables may be suppressed in two ways: by suppressing a vowel at the end of a word when the next word commences with a vowel; by suppressing a vowel within a word. The former method is termed elision, and ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... though 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 what they ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... word is either a secondary entry or a parenthesized alternative spelling in the form "ms ()". headword spelled "ms" Minor difference, generally an added or omitted macron or a predictable vowel variation such as for . form of "ms" The referenced word is an inflected form. A few very common patterns such as adverbs in "-lce" listed under adjectives in "-lic" are not individually noted. redirected ...
— A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - For the Use of Students • John R. Clark Hall
... 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, ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman
... consists of vowelless words. The correct vowels must be ascertained before the meaning of a word or sentence can be definitely established. The vowel points of our Hebrew Bibles are not older than the seventh century A.D., and are frequently erroneous. In the present case the word stealing does not occur in the text, but only ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of the 17th century; and there again they were visited in 1850 by a Protestant mission, which succeeded in obtaining from them Hebrew rolls of parts of the Pentateuch in the square character, with vowel points. After this, it was generally believed that the few remaining stragglers, who seemed to be entirely ignorant of everything connected with their faith, had become merged in the ordinary population. A recent traveller, however, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... ] have been used in this version of the text. When used, it indicates that the vowel it surrounds is a long vowel with a macron ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... the finding of an English word of three letters, each letter being found on a different dial. Now, there is no English word composed of consonants alone, and the only vowel appearing anywhere on the dials is Y. No English word begins with Y and has the two other letters consonants, and all the words of three letters ending in Y (with two consonants) either begin with an S or have H, L, or R ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... of articulation are dropping an unaccented vowel, sounding incorrectly an unaccented vowel, suppressing final consonants, omitting or mispronouncing syllables, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... ana; and of 'father' by such as papa, baba, tata. Its true explanation has been found to be that, in the infant's first attempt to utter articulate sounds, the consonants m, p, and t decidedly preponderate; and the natural vowel a, associated with these, yields the child's first syllables. It repeats such sounds as ma-ma-ma or pa-pa-pa, without attaching any meaning to them; the parents apply these sounds to themselves, and thus impart ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... 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 to us uncorrupted, even though the original ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... but not very feasible, 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 ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... 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, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... as I understand that you are come rejoicing and bringing your sheaves with you. They tell me you have been extraordinarily successful. What do you say is the name of this queen whose tomb you have found—Ma-Mee? A very unusual name. How do you get the extra vowel? Is it for euphony, eh? Did I not know how good a scholar you are, I should be tempted to believe that you had misread it. Me-Mee, Ma-Mee! That would be pretty in French, would it not? Ma mie—my darling! Well, ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... do not study German, you would not know what was meant by the name of the city if you saw it printed in that language," the professor began. "It is written Koeln, with the umlaut, or diaeresis, over the vowel, which gives it a sound similar to, but not the same as, the e in the word met. It is the third city of Prussia, Berlin and Breslau alone being larger, and has a population of one hundred and twenty thousand. On the opposite bank of the Rhine is Deutz, with which Cologne is connected ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... so as to indicate the pronunciation. The vowel of the accented syllable is marked by the grave accent (') if long, and by the ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... of the consonants in the swearing Welshman's mouth (humorously described by Messrs. Chambers) is difficult of explanation. The words usual in Welsh oaths afford no clue to its solution; for the name of the Deity has two consonants and one vowel in English, while it has two vowels and one consonant in Welsh. Another name invoked on these occasions has three consonants and two vowels in English, and one of the vowels is usually elided; in Welsh it has three vowels and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... the monosyllable in a dry, metallic voice pitched higher than his usual key. The English softening of the vowel sound, so droll to the American ear, was also more pronounced than was customary in his speech, so that the exclamation became a ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King |
