"Alphabet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be the most difficult language to learn in our day; but the ancient cuneiform was certainly quite as complicated as Chinese. The cuneiform had no real alphabet, only 'signs.' There were five hundred simple signs, and nearly as many compound signs, so that the student had to begin with a thousand different signs to memorize. Yes, boys had their ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... in propounding chiefly the search of causes and productions of things concrete, which are infinite and transitory, and not of abstract natures, which are few and permanent. That these natures are as the alphabet or simple letters, whereof the variety of things consisteth; or as the colours mingled in the painter's shell, wherewith he is able to make infinite variety of faces or shapes. An enumeration of them according to popular note. ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... of 'em who did not know a letter of the alphabet, whose naturally dull minds had become more stupified by habitual vice— those men, who wus her inferiors, and her servants in every thing else, wus each one of 'em her king here, and she his slave: and they compelled her to ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... Simk, Ghafar, Zubn, Ikll, Kalb, Shaulah, Na'am, Baldah, Sa'ad al-Zbih, Sa'ad al-Bul'a, Sa'ad al-Su'd, Sa'ad al-Akhbiyah, Fargh the Former and Fargh the Latter; and Risha. They are disposed in the order of the letters of the Abjad-hawwaz or older alphabet,[FN420] according to their numerical power, and in them are secret virtues which none knoweth save Allah (extolled and exalted be He!) and the stablished in science. They are divided among the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, two Mansions and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... call out the secret of his letter, the clerks themselves would veil their faces and forget the postal alphabet. A painful silence reigns over this scene of anxious waiting; at long intervals a hoarse voice calls out his Christian name, and woe to its owner if his ancestors have not bequeathed him a short or ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... mankind in a boundless variety of characters as well as features, and has given Ciphers to make up numbers, and very often by such additions renders the few much more significant and conspicuous. The Church has its Ciphers—for a mitre looks as well on a round 0 as on any letter in the alphabet, 226and the expense to the nation is equally the same; consequently, John Bull ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... answered thus the aged man, "He's not in Nature's debt; His ears so tight are seal'd, he can- Not learn his alphabet." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... Egyptian. The letters p, t, and l were in both names. The hieroglyphic signs found in both names must be these three letters. That beginning gave all the other signs in both words, and the rest of the alphabet soon followed. Justly great is the fame of the Frenchman Champollion, who has the honor of having first deciphered and read this lost language, and opened to us the secret treasures of its history ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... The Study of History 2. Prehistoric Peoples 3. Domestication of Animals and Plants 4. Writing and the Alphabet 5. Primitive Science and ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... prudent to side with the latter, and therefore, doubtless, considered it wise to suppress all evidence of Reuchlin's influence upon his beliefs. All the other editions of the Margarita in my possession are content with teaching, under the head of the Alphabet, that the Hebrew letters were invented by Adam. On Luther's view of the words "God said," see Farrar, Language and Languages. For a most valuable statement regarding the clashing opinions at the Reformation, see Max Muller, as above, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... mentioned in the Judge's diary, it is perhaps to note the parents' pride in the eighteen-months-old infant's knowledge of the catechism, an acquirement rewarded by the gift of a red apple, but which suggests the reason for many funerals. Or, again, difficulties with the alphabet are sorrowfully put down; and also deliquencies at the age of four in attending family prayer, with a full account of punishments meted out to the culprit. Such details are, indeed, but natural, for under the stern conditions imposed by Cotton and the Mathers, religion looms large ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... they correspond by signs; they have a simpler alphabet than that of the deaf and dumb, for each idea that they may require to express for ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... were known. The Phoenicians, far more enterprising than either, must have been fully acquainted with their means of written communication—and indeed we are assured that they were so. Now, if a Phoenician had imparted so much of the art to Greece as the knowledge of a written alphabet, is it probable that he would have suffered the communication to cease there! The Phoenicians were a commercial people—their colonies in Greece were for commercial purposes,—would they have wilfully and voluntarily neglected the most convenient mode of commercial correspondence?—importing ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... In this churchyard is a tombstone on which is engraved only the letters of the alphabet and the simple numerals. The story goes, that he who lies below, an illiterate inhabitant of the village in the last century, whose name, I believe, is now forgotten, being very anxious that, after death, a tombstone ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... were some of the correspondents of this body much more solid in their speculations than themselves; one intelligent gentleman having suggested, as a means of conferring signal advantages on the cause, an alteration of the Greek alphabet. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... she say. "Each one contains one of the first seven letters of the English Alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, a letter for each girl. Miss Sterling, will you be kind enough to give them to the ...
— Seven Maids of Far Cathay • Bing Ding, Ed.
... boy liked this manner of learning to read very much. Each day he passed some hours, sometimes in the cabin, sometimes on the deck, in arranging and disarranging the letters of his alphabet. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... this. One of the Scott girls wanted me to teach her Bengali. When taking her through the alphabet I expressed my pride that Bengali spelling has a conscience, and does not delight in overstepping rules at every step. I made clear to her how laughable would have been the waywardness of English spelling but for the tragic compulsion ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... go has been our motto. It is hoped the form is most convenient. All is arranged under one alphabet, with a complete index. The author has consulted many intelligent cultivators and writers, who, without exception, approve his plan. All agree in saying that it is designed to fill a place not occupied by any other single volume in the language. It is impossible, without ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... which I examined in the Gottingen Library, but whether belonging to the work or a MS. addition I cannot now call to mind. The fanciful and flowery form of its letters gives great scope to the imagination in assigning them their particular position in the alphabet, and the difficulty of reading them is enhanced by the doubts of German archaeologists whether they are initials or component parts of a sentence. Herr Joseph v. Hammer Purgstall, however, in his version RECORD DE SCI GNSI, or in full Recordamini de sancta Gnosi, deduces ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... the alphabet of his calling. He knew the value of effect. He threw himself at once into the orator's pose. His gown took sculptural lines; his arms were waved majestically, as arms that were conscious of having great sleeves to accentuate the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... some music a strange appeal beyond the reach of words. Those mysterious sharps and flats, and major and minor chords, are an alphabet that in some occult combinations forms another higher language than that of speech, a language which, as we listen, thrills us to ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... strong resemblance to certain markings on the Breton rocks, and are thought to possess an alphabetic or magical significance. In Scotland spirals are commonly found on stones marked with ogham inscriptions, and it is remarkable that they should occur in New Caledonia in connexion with a dot 'alphabet.' The New Caledonian crosses, however, approximate more to the later crosses of Celtic art, while the spirals resemble those met with in the earlier examples of Celtic work. But the closest parallel to the New Caledonian stone-markings to be found in Scotland is supplied ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... moment, but did not understand in the least. All she said was, "what funny words you use!" She went back to her alphabet—A, house; B, cat. It came more ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... unnecessary, nothing puzzling. Therefore, after a room has been once arranged, there must be no change in it. For new possessions there must be new rooms, and after twenty years' absence—coming back to the room in which one learned one's bird or beast alphabet, we should be able to show our children the old bird on the old perch in the accustomed corner. But—first of all, let the room be beautifully complete, i.e. complete ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... veracious reports respecting the latest hidden thoughts of "Badinguet," and vivid descriptions of the respective toilets of the Empress Eugenie, Baroness de B—-, Madame la Comtesse C—-, la belle Marquise d'E—-, and all the other fashionable letters of the alphabet—chronicling the very latest achievements in "Robes en train" and "Costumes a ravir" of the great artist Worth. Even the men folk of America—"shoddy" of course—dote on those accounts of European toilets, which we never see given in any of our papers, excepting ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... them in spite of the general report, that a dead kingfisher will not turn its breast to the wind. He convinced himself that if two magnetic needles were placed in the centre of rings marked with the alphabet (an odd anticipation of the electric telegraph, minus the wires), they would not point to the same letter by an occult sympathy. His arguments are often to the point, though overlaid with a strange accretion of the fabulous. In discussing the question of the blackness ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... with avidity. That language had never been totally extinct in Italy; but at the time on which we are touching, there were not probably six persons in the whole country acquainted with it. Dante had quoted Greek authors, but without having known the Greek alphabet. The person who favoured Petrarch with this coveted instruction was Bernardo Barlaamo, a Calabrian monk, who had been three years before at Avignon, having come as envoy from Andronicus, the eastern Emperor, on pretext ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... hours be subdivided, as ordinary hours, into minutes and seconds. Note.—As an alternative means of distinguishing the cosmic hours from the hours in local reckonings, they may be denoted by the letters of the alphabet, which, omitting I and V, are ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... influence of this development upon the lives of the people has been profound. Whether the influence has been wholly for good may not be so conclusively apparent. Lord Bacon has declared that, excepting only the alphabet and the art of printing, those inventions abridging distance are of the greatest service to mankind. If this be true, it may be said that the invention of telephony deserves high place among the ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... if any of your correspondents could inform me (and that soon) whether there be published, in English, French, German, or Spanish (though it is most desired in English), a manual giving a standard alphabet for the various kinds of writing now in use, viz. English hand, engrossing, Italian, German text, &c., with directions for teaching the same; in fact, a sort of writing-master's key: and if so, what is its title, and where it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... I'm a married man. Ven you're a married man, Samivel, you'll understand a good many things as you don't understand now; but vether it's worth while goin' through so much, to learn so little, as the charity-boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o' taste. I rayther think it ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... daring, or his profanity, and is admired and envied by his group. The same with the army; the same with the literary and journalistic craft; the publishing craft; the cod-fishery craft; Standard Oil; U. S. Steel; the class A hotel —and the rest of the alphabet in that line; the class A prize-fighter —and the rest of the alphabet in his line—clear down to the lowest and obscurest six-boy gang of little gamins, with its one boy that can thrash the rest, and to whom he is king of Samoa, bottom of the royal race, but looked up ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... quite unprepared for the velocity with which the telegraph alphabet of sounds in dots and dashes rattled over the instrument, appropriately termed a "sounder," upon which messages are received, and found herself wholly unable to write down the words as fast as ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education, another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and under pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... get up and pray!' she cried. The chief arose, and, on opening his eyes, beheld the same glaring lights, and heard the same ominous sound. Impelled by the extreme urgency of the case, he commenced, with all possible vehemence, to vociferate the alphabet, as a prayer to God to deliver them from the vengeance of Satan! On hearing this, the cat, as much alarmed as themselves, fled precipitately away, leaving the chief and his wife congratulating themselves on the efficacy of ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of the numerals in words would do well to take up: it is the formation of sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only once. No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you and I can do it. Dr. Whewell[602] and I amused ourselves, some years ago, with attempts. He could not make sense, though he joined ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Salon, insisting with a feverish eloquence and invention that he should worship all that she worshipped—no matter if he did not understand!—let him worship all the same—till he had learnt his new alphabet with a smiling docility, and caught her very tricks of phrase. Especially were they haunters of the sculptures in the Louvre, where, because of the difficulty of it, she piqued herself most especially on knowledge, and could convict him most triumphantly of a barbarian ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... around the trees, they are to join hands and walk round, every child saying the multiplication table, until they have finished it; they then let go hands, and put them behind, and for variety's sake, sing the pence table, the alphabet, hymns, &c. &c.; thus the children are gradually improved and delighted, for they call it play, and it is of little consequence what they call it, so long as they are edified, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... so that's the reason I aint smart. I can write, though, better'n some of the boys up at school. I saw lots of names on the shed door. See here now," and scrambling down, Ben pulled out a cherished bit of chalk and flourished off ten letters of the alphabet, one on each of the dark stone slabs that paved ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... a mile or more, and then, judging with a long tack he could weather the southerly side of the island he put the boat about. He took occasion to explain to Helen how this operation was necessary, and she learned the alphabet of navigation. The western end of their little land now lay before them; it was about three miles in breadth. For two miles the bluff coast line continued unbroken; then a deep bay, a mile in width and two miles in depth, was made by a long tongue of sand ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... is my transliteration of Greek text into English using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table. The diacritical ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... king in my own country, the Talking Cricket told me - because my feet burned - that the alphabet had been swallowed by the cat - that was hung to a tree by a dog - that was owned by the director ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... sorts of people in the world, the Cockney has the queerest notions about vegetable nature. Show him the first letter of the alphabet, for instance, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... taught the Arab to sing rhymes." But the poems thus sung by camel-drivers are generally short and never reach epic might or length. None of those older poems now exist, and it was only when travellers applied the Syrian alphabet to the Arabic tongue in the sixth century that written records began to be kept of favorite compositions. Poets were then looked upon as wise men, or magicians, and called upon, like Balaam, in times of danger, to utter spells ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... form the beginnings of what is called our Literature. Literature really means letters, for it comes from a Latin word littera, meaning a letter of the alphabet. Words are made by letters of the alphabet being set together, and our literature again by words being set ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... (x. 10) describes Vetranio with more temper, and probably with more truth, than either of the two Victors. Vetranio was born of obscure parents in the wildest parts of Maesia; and so much had his education been neglected, that, after his elevation, he studied the alphabet.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... shipments without shifting, was of Scottish ancestry. Alexander Davidson (b. 1832) made many inventions in connection with the typewriter, one of the most important being the scale regarding the value of the letters of the alphabet. As an inventor he was of the front rank. Andrew Smith Hallidie (b. 1836), son of a native of Dunfermline, was the inventor of steel-wire rope making and also the inventor of the "Hallidie ropeway," which led up to the introduction of cable railroads. James ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... flashes of alert intelligence. For forty-two months that child was content to sit on his fanny and vegetate. Never crawled, never spoke, never played, seldom even focused his eyes. Then one day his mother sees him study some alphabet blocks with every appearance of curiosity. ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... Greek, and a Latin quotation—"Verum, quum latebris delituit diu, emergit"; and of Wolfius Cphalus, also of Strassburg; and here again we have the Mark environed by quotations in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. In a few instances we have the unlucky letter of the Greek alphabet—theta—forming a Mark with considerable originality, as in that of Guillaume Morel, where this symbol of death is surrounded by two dragon serpents representing immortality. The theta was also employed by ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... WITH feathers.' The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Chinese education, however brief, would not be fair without mention of the crushing handicap under which her people labor and must always labor so long as the language remains as it is to-day—without an alphabet—separate and arbitrary characters to be learned for each and every word in the language. This means an absolute waste of at least five years in the pupil's school life, except in so far as memorizing the characters counts as memory-training, and five years ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... himself to the study of letters, [Greek: grammata mathein], fearing the danger of falling into had company at school, he seems to mean only Greek letters, then the language of all the learned; for he must have learned at home the Egyptian alphabet. In the same manner we are to understand Evagrius and others, who relate, that a certain philosopher expressing his surprise how St. Antony could employ his time, being deprived of the pleasure of reading, the saint told him that ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... wants me to help her! Just afternoons, you know; not evenings. She's going to have two or three girls to help her. Miss Frost asked Gladys to be with her. You see, it's this way. Haven't you heard about the Alphabet of Booths?" ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... was allowed to go out foraging, under escort of a guard, has returned with a rope of dried onions; a can of alphabet noodles; half a pound of stale, crumbly macaroons; a few fresh string beans; a pot of strained honey, and several clean collars of assorted sizes. The woman of the-house is now making soup for us out of the beans, the onions and the noodles. She has also produced ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... commencement of a philological age, every one studies languages; that is, every one who is fit for nothing else; philology being the last resource of dulness and ennui, I have got a little in advance of the throng, by mastering the Armenian alphabet; but I foresee the time when every unmarriageable miss, and desperate blockhead, will likewise have acquired the letters of Mesroub, and will know the term for bread, in Armenian, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Then, from his assortment of bottles, he began picking over his morning dosage. Vitamins, of course; got to keep plenty of vitamins in the system, or it goes all to pot on you. A, B1, B2, B12, C, ... and on down the alphabet and past it to A-G. All-purpose mineral capsules, presumably containing every element useful to the human body and possibly a couple that weren't. Two APC capsules. (Aspirin-Phenacetin-Caffeine. He liked the way those words sounded; very medicinal.) A milk-of-magnesia tablet, just ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... children seated themselves, Peregrine on one side, and Patience on the other, to study their lessons. They were given queer little books, called the New England Primer, in wooden covers, and having funny, tiny pictures for each letter of the alphabet, and beside each, a jingle. There were verses to be learned from the Bible, too. Patience held her primer up close to her nose and studied very diligently, but Peregrine's eyes wandered out of the window and toward the blue sky. He was thinking of a kite he planned to make ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... the five when fixed numbers are to be thrown or hit. Why? Because you must turn your ill luck in love to advantage: and those from whom it comes are the two beautiful Ortlieb Es, as Nuremberg folk call the ladies Els and Eva. That makes the two. But E is the fifth letter in the alphabet, so I should choose the five. If Biberli did not put things ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... place under a particular king in a particular year, the story undoubtedly depicts correctly, at least in a general way, the relations subsisting in the earliest epochs of civilization. A common knowledge of agriculture, like a common knowledge of the alphabet, of war chariots, of purple, and other implements and ornaments, far more frequently warrants the inference of an ancient intercourse between nations than of their original unity. But as regards the Greeks and Italians, whose mutual relations are comparatively well known, the hypothesis that ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Buchanan, Wallace, Burns, Bruce; and Bruce was as jolly a first-mate as ever sailed under the cross-bones of the British flag. The crew was composed of four Newfoundland sailor men; and the cook, whose h'eighth letter of the h'alphabet smacked somewhat strongly of H'albion. As for the rest, there was Mrs. Captain Capstan, Captain and Mrs. Captain Capstan's baby; Picton and myself. It is cruel to speak of a baby, except in terms of endearment and affection, and therefore I could not but condemn Picton, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... gentleness with firmness; and if these had not been sufficient, she had reserves of character which would have given her the mastery over much less plastic material than these ignorant but eager young people. The work of instruction was simple enough, for most of the pupils began with the alphabet, which they acquired from Webster's blue-backed spelling-book, the palladium of Southern education at that epoch. The much abused carpet-baggers had put the spelling-book within reach of every child of school age in North Carolina,—a fact which is often overlooked when the ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... no idea of letters, no alphabet, nor is their language reducible to rules: 'tis by painting they preserve the memory of the only events which interest them, or that they think worth recording, the conquests gained over ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... heaven's alphabet Hath many a word of mystery; I read not all thy record yet, Though perseveringly I try; But teach me, Lord! and none shall be More prompt, more pleased to learn ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... derive a great deal of amusement from this simple pastime. At the top of a piece of paper write all the letters of the alphabet. Underneath, the child who has thought of a word or short sentence puts a dash down for every letter contained in the ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... the Eton Latin Grammar till we knew every word of it by heart, but we did scarcely any retranslation from English into Latin. Much of our time was wasted on the merest trifles, such as learning to write, for example, like copperplate, and, still more extraordinary, in copying the letters of the alphabet as they are ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... were. Of course, there were worse names than Ben Holt. It was surely better than Eygji Watts, whose sanguine parents were said to have named him with the first five letters they drew from a hat containing the alphabet; Ben Holt was assuredly better than Eygji, even had this not been rendered into "Hedge-hog" by careless companions. His last confusion of ideas was a wondering if Bernal Linford was as good a name as ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords at the suit of the Crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. "A subject," said Chief Justice Markham to that Prince, "may arrest for treason: the King cannot; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little damaged. This duty over, I met the escort sergeant no more, but was transferred to the care of a quaint old boy who made an astonishing display of learning. He had four or five Latin proverbs at his command. He knew the Greek alphabet, had picked up a bit of Hindostani on Indian service, and a little bit of French and Turkish in the Crimea. All these he aired upon me in a very natural manner, and I was much impressed with his erudition, until a grinning ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... than the insertion of these pieces of criticism in a respectable periodical. We are not insulted with opinions on music from persons ignorant of its notes; nor with treatises on philology by persons unacquainted with the alphabet; but here is page after page of criticism, which one may read from end to end, looking for something which the writer knows, and finding nothing. Not his own language, for he has to look in his dictionary, by his own confession, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... studying the notebook she had found in the secret hiding place, and of making herself conversant with the gang's cipher; and she now set to work upon it. It was a numerical cipher. Each letter of the alphabet in regular rotation was represented by its corresponding numeral; a zero was employed to set off one letter from another, and the addition of the numerals between the zeros indicated the number of the letter involved. Also, there being but ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... earning a living. If he was intended for anything, it was no doubt his father's wish that he should enter the Church; and he got such education as the poor Irish clergyman—who was not a very provident person—could afford. The child Goldsmith was first of all taught his alphabet at home, by a maid-servant, who was also a relation of the family; then, at the age of six, he was sent to that village school which, with its profound and learned master, he has made familiar to all of us; and after that he was sent further a-field for his learning, ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... of a poetic connotation. This editor liked short, crisp sentences. He wanted his adjectives served hot. He despised poetic connotation. Being only an editor, his name was Brown. If he had been a writer, he would have had three names, beginning with successive letters of the alphabet. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... pronunciation of the Greek language which then prevailed; and in a short time, so Strype, in his Life of Sir T. Smith, tells us, his more correct way 'prevailed all the University over.' He also endeavoured to introduce a new English alphabet of twenty-nine letters, and to amend the spelling of the time, 'some of the syllables,' he considered, 'being stuffed with needless letters.' As early as 1531 he had become a Fellow of his college, and in 1534 he was chosen University Orator. In 1540 Smith paid a visit ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... two sacred names of God, Adonai and Elohim, which characterized Him as benevolent and as powerful. The face of each Cherub measured one span, and the wings extended each ten spans, making twenty-two spans in all, corresponding to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. [333] It was "from between the two Cherubim" that God communed with Moses, for the Shekinah never wholly descended to earth any more than any mortal ever quite mounted into the heaven, even Moses and Elijah stood a slight distance from heaven; for, "The heaven, even the heavens, are the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... had developed a huge publishing establishment with one big printing plant in Barcelona and another in Manchester, and we were studying the peculiar difficulties that might attend the establishment of a third plant in America. Our company was an English company under the name of Alphabet and Mollentrave, and we were rapidly making it the broadest and steadiest flow of publication the world had ever seen. Its streams already reached further and carried more than any single firm had ever managed to do before. We were reprinting, in as carefully ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... quelque armoire Ce vieil alphabet tout jauni, Ma premiere lecon d'histoire, Mon premier ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... a tradition that Cadmus introduced into Greece the letters of the alphabet which were invented by the Phoenicians. This is alluded to by Byron, where, addressing the modern Greeks, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... clothes be washed every week? Name each of your Five Senses. 12. What can your skin tell you that your eyes and ears cannot? 13. Do you know of any trade or occupation in which it is necessary to train one's sense of touch? Tell about it. 14. What are the blind children in the picture doing? (Their alphabet does not look like yours, for the letters are represented by groups of raised dots or dashes or curves, which are more easily and quickly felt.) 15. What must you do besides washing and brushing to keep your skin in ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... thousand of a sword, at a time when this copious dictionary was intrusted to the memory of an illiterate people. The monuments of the Homerites were inscribed with an obsolete and mysterious character; but the Cufic letters, the groundwork of the present alphabet, were invented on the banks of the Euphrates; and the recent invention was taught at Mecca by a stranger who settled in that city after the birth of Mahomet. The arts of grammar, of metre, and of rhetoric, were unknown to the freeborn eloquence of the Arabians; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... towards each other, though we get along very well together. But Mulgrum wrote out for me that he was born in Cherryfield, Maine, and obtained his education as a deaf mute in Hartford. I learned the deaf and dumb alphabet when I was a schoolmaster, as a pastime, and I had some practice with it in the house ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... and it was remarked that the Catholics favored the former pronunciation, the Protestants gave countenance to the new. Gardiner employed the authority of the king and council to suppress innovations in this particular, and to preserve the corrupt sound of the Greek alphabet. So little liberty was then allowed of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... educated man begins to learn his alphabet at the age of four or five. During the following years he receives the necessary grounding to prepare him for the lower forms of a public school. At eleven, or thereabouts, he commences his school career. Throughout the whole of this period he is put through a course of study identical ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... point, perhaps, concerning the names of cultivars is that they should not be in Latin, but in any modern language using the so-called Roman alphabet (i.e. the alphabet in which English, French, German, etc., are written). The reason for this is, of course, to distinguish, at a glance, names of cultivars from names of wild varieties, which are in Latin. In the future, Latin names for cultivars will definitely not be allowed ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... which completed the alphabet (making seventeen of this part of the work) were delivered to the subscribers. As a precautionary measure, those for foreign countries were sent out first, then those for the provinces, and lastly those for Paris. The eleven volumes of plates were ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... claims to have never attended school or been privately taught in her life. And she can't write or even form the letters of the alphabet, but she gave her interviewer a very convincing demonstration of her ability to read. When asked how she mastered the art of reading, she replied: "The Lord revealed ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... that no grab of the enemy can dislodge it; getting down under kicks fast enough to take advantage of any fumble by the enemy in trying for a "fair catch;" getting a quick start the moment the ball was snapped back, and a dozen other elemental features that constitute the alphabet of the game. The boys had practiced these things a hundred times before, but they can never be done too often or too well; and to-day under the new stimulus they outdid themselves. Each tried to surpass his fellows and worked as he had never ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... now replaced. A few letters of the alphabet were sprinkled round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round the dome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literature of Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed flat against another leaf, one burnished letter laid smooth ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... so designated—that we gather the real genius, or mental character of the ordinary classes of society. I do assure you that some of these chap publications are singularly droll and curious. Even the very rudiments of learning, or the mere alphabet-book, meets the eye in a very imposing manner—as ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... have that twist in my brain, which is the curse of my countrymen—a sort of devilish quickness at doing well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing that makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets, and keeps them dunces before the alphabet. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... see no other way of accounting for such alleged variations of gender, and number, and case, than by forgery, when the very forger himself must have seen them? Or do they seriously prefer some letter of the Gaelic alphabet to a law of nature? Will they forego the facts of an epoch, for the orthography of a syllable? If so, then the friends of Ossian, who is one great mass of facts, must turn once more to the common sense of the public, and leave his etymological ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... European children so far as they have been tried, but they have not been put to abstract reasoning. Their perceptive powers are large, as they are much exercised in procuring food, etc. Anything requiring perception only is readily mastered, the alphabet will be known in a few lessons; figures are soon recognised, and the quantities they represent, but addition from figures alone always presents difficulties for a while, but in a little time, however, it ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... this was as familiar to him as the letters of the alphabet. While Jason Philip gaped at his lips in dumb inspiration, the Baron himself thought of things that had not the remotest ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... through an assorted collection of brain stufferies, get so many college degrees that his name looks like Halley's Comet with an alphabet tail, and then teach college students for forty years without even taking one of them apart to find out what he is made of, beats my time! That's a college professor for you, right through. He thinks of a college student only as something to teach—whereas, of all the nineteen hundred and ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... lecturing. The professorship was obscure; he said it was Athenian, and Bobus had no immediate means of finding out whether it were so or not, nor of analysing the alphabet of letters that followed his name upon the advertisement ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... large clear type, contains alphabet and edifying and entertaining stories for children. 12mo. Paper ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... they introduced were naturally those of the Greek alphabet, to which they were obliged, in order to represent certain sounds which do not occur in the Greek language,[4] to add a number of other signs borrowed from the Hebrew, the Armenian, and the Coptic. So closely, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... collecting and arranging the manuscripts which had survived the desolation inflicted upon his country by the arms of Assyria, at the same time substituting for the more ancient characters usually known as the Samaritan the Chaldean alphabet, to which his followers had now become accustomed. From these notices, however, which respect a later period, we return to the more primitive times immediately succeeding the ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... on a piece of paper that was slowly drawn under it by clockwork. Now if the man at one end of the line held his key down for only an instant, this impression would look like a dot. If he held it down longer, it would look like a short dash. Morse combined these dots and dashes into an alphabet. For instance, one dash meant the letter "t," and so on. For a time people only laughed at Morse. But at length Congress gave him enough money to build a line from Baltimore to Washington. It was opened in 1844, ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... cautiously through the brushwood and looked down. She shivered a little. From here they could see beneath the bows of the rocket-ship. And there was a name there, in the Cyrillic alphabet which was the official written language of the Com-Pubs. Here, on United Nations soil, it was insolent. It boasted that the red ship came, not from an alien planet, but from a nation more alien still to all the United Nations stood for. The ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... represents a letter, which is not very likely, as not all the words could possibly consist of four letters each; but they might be the initial letters of certain words, giving sufficient of the word to enable one to guess the rest. Now there are 26 letters in the alphabet. Taking A as being 1, B as 2, C as 3, and so on up to Z as 26, let us apply this ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, is the only red man admitted to the nation's Hall of Fame in the Capitol at Washington. The Indian languages, more than fifty in number, are better appreciated and more studied to-day than ever before. Half our states have Indian names, and more than that proportion of ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... comfort, will feed men, will heal men, will provide for their physical needs, yet the primary and fundamental result of the gospel is to develop man himself, not merely to relieve his want on an occasion. It does that as a matter of course, but that is scarcely the first letter of the alphabet. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [food and raiment] shall be added unto you." The way to relieve a man is to develop him so that he will need no relief, or to raise higher and higher the character of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... human face a hieroglyph, which, to be sure, admits of being deciphered—nay, the whole alphabet of which we carry about with us. Indeed, the face of a man, as a rule, bespeaks more interesting matter than his tongue, for it is the compendium of all which he will ever say, as it is the register of all his thoughts and aspirations. Moreover, the tongue only speaks the ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... goodness and worth inspires; and it is not necessary for intimate friends to go every day through those civilities and attentions which they practise with strangers, any more than it is necessary, among literary people, to repeat the alphabet over every day before ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... in relation to Ireland, is one of the most atrocious known to the history of mankind. It is fraught with the blackest ingratitude, the vilest injustice, and the direst oppression. Notwithstanding that Ireland first gave her an alphabet, and taught her how to spell her name—notwithstanding that Irish missionaries had nurtured her early educational institutions and reclaimed her from Paganism, she misrepresented their religion and their learning in high places, stole ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... finger to the pocket of Richling's coat, where the subscription-list had disappeared,—"this sort of work—whether you distinctly propose to be a philanthropist or not—is right, of course. It's good. But it's the mere alphabet of beneficence. Richling, whenever philanthropy takes the guise of philanthropy, look out. Confine your philanthropy—you can't do it entirely, but as much as you can—confine your philanthropy to the motive. It's the temptation ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... painted terra-cotta. They have swings, and ride on sticks and build houses. When bigger, the boy has his tops and hoops, with or without bells, and he plays marbles with nuts. Meanwhile attempts are made, somewhat after the kindergarten pattern, to teach them their alphabet by means of letters shaped in wood or ivory. Whether or not it is modern kindergarten method to tempt children to learn by offers of sugar-plums, that course was often adopted in the world of both Greece ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader, Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a class was engaged on an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The eagerness for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... only a part of a play, and his interest merely the interest of a looker-on." There was an indignant rasp in Roger's voice, and he looked across to his father with a protesting scowl. "He almost made me feel as if I had never learned the alphabet." ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... section of a printed book is lettered or numbered. Each letter or number is called the "sheet's signature." Printers usually leave out J W and V in lettering sheets. If there are more sections than there are letters in the alphabet, the printer doubles the letters, signing the sections A A, B B, and so on, after the single letters are exhausted. Some printers use an Arabic numeral before the section number to denote the second alphabet, ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... the cuneiform alphabet, by which pictures have been reduced to phonetic signs, the attempt has been made to arrange or classify these gods according to their proper order in the Pantheon, but thus far much obscurity and doubt seem ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... A, B, C, As bees where flowers are set: Would'st thou a skilful teacher be?— Learn, then, this alphabet. ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... books on the woman question and gave 1,000 books about women to the Boston Public Library. The founder of Smith College said she was led to leave her fortune for that purpose by reading his article, Ought Women Learn the Alphabet? ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... against Apion, i. Sec. 8. Origen says that the Hebrews had twenty-two sacred books corresponding to the number of letters in their alphabet. Opera, ii. 528. It would appear from Jerome that they reckoned in the following manner: they considered the Twelve Minor Prophets only one book; First and Second Samuel, one book; First and Second Kings, one book; First ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... exclaimed Cordelia, in sign language on her fingers. Etiquette forbade her to employ her tongue in the expression of her gratitude, seeing that the girls had placed a ban on it. A curious contortion of the deaf-and-dumb alphabet was used among the Indian girls when pride forbade the use ...
— Big and Little Sisters • Theodora R. Jenness
... "Bibliographia Eruditorum Critico-Curiosa," 1689, 1701, 4 vols., 12mo., being an alphabetical account of writers—extracts from whom are in the public literary Journals of Europe from 1665 to 1700—with the title of their works—is Beughem's best production, and if each volume had not had a separate alphabet, and contained additions upon additions, the work would have proved highly useful. His "Gallia Euridita," Amst., 1683, 12mo., is miserably perplexing. In addition to Marchand, consult the Polyhist. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... took turns reading the news, while the ranger's expression of amazement and admiration grew deeper and deeper, and his liking and respect for his young subordinate increased rapidly. Finally the ranger was given his first lesson in radio-telegraphy. While Lew was writing down for him the wireless alphabet, Charley was showing him how to make the letters on the spark-gap. Before they turned in for the night, the ranger had learned to distinguish the difference between the sound of a dot and of a dash as the signals buzzed ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... language; and being always keenly on the alert, we made extraordinary progress in attempting bits of conversation and in reducing their speech for the first time to a written form—for the New Hebrideans had no literature, and not even the rudiments of an alphabet. I used to hire some of the more intelligent lads and men to sit and talk with us, and answer our questions about names and sounds; but they so often deceived us, and we, doubtless, misunderstood them so often, that this course ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... down to influenza on his own account. He is but just better and it looks as though Fanny were about to bring up the rear. As for me, I am all right, though I was reduced to dictating Anne in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, which I think you will admit is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Aristoxenus. The fourth book, in eighteen chapters, is entirely relative to the practice of the art, particularly to the notation. It is in this book that Boethius makes known the Latin notation of the first fifteen letters of the alphabet without preparation, without the slightest explanation, and as if he had done something which any one concerned with music at Rome would readily understand, as a matter of course. There is not one word to show that ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... but you may Guess who I mean. When are you coming home, Betty? I want so to see your dear face. My Respects to Gulian and Clarissa, and Obedience to Grandma—I do not Recollect her whole Name. My Sampler is more perfectly Evil than ever, but I have completed the Alphabet and I danced on it, which Miss Bidwell said was Outrageous naughty, but my temper Felt calmed afterward. It has taken four Days to write this, farewell, from your lonesome ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... print and pictures were intended for. The scholars came out at recess, and my mistresses gave me such instructions as they were able, which gave me a start ahead that enabled me to memorize the first six letters of the alphabet by the time ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... waiting for him in the parlour, and they went a long walk up the avenues and across half the alphabet in the streets, and through the pretty squares and circles, where the statues were sometimes beautiful and always picturesque; and the sparrows made a vernal chirping in the naked trees and on the green grass. In two or three they sat down ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of Malay words in the native character is hardly yet fixed, though the Perso-Arabic alphabet has been in use since the thirteenth century; and those follow but a vain shadow who seek to prescribe exact modes of spelling words regarding which even native authorities are not agreed, and of which ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... principle we have many apt illustrations in ordinary life, among which the various groupings of the ten numeral figures into sums of any amount, and the forming of so many thousands of words by a different arrangement of the letters of the alphabet, are familiar examples. When a child knows the ten numerals, he requires no more teaching to ascertain the precise amount of any one number among all the millions which these figures can represent. The value of such an acquirement can only be appreciated by considering the labour it would cost a ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... priests, in spite of the intolerant law and with the connivance of the local authorities, also a few scattered nuns, teach in a contraband fashion a few small groups of Catholic children; five or six little girls around a disguised Ursuline nun spell out the alphabet in a back room;[3165] a priest without tonsure or cassock secretly receives in the evening two or three youths whom he makes translate the De Viris.—During the intervals, indeed, of the Reign of Terror, before the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the simpler alphabet of the business, continued to occupy him. He consulted both Neergard and Gerald as usual; they often consulted him or pretended to do so. Land was bought and sold and resold, new projects discussed, new properties appraised, new mortgage loans negotiated; ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... never translate the Koran, they neglect the best means of influencing the Africans, who invariably wish to understand what they are about. When we were teaching adults the alphabet, they felt it a hard task. "Give me medicine, I shall drink it to make me understand it," was their earnest entreaty. When they have advanced so far as to form clear conceptions of Old Testament and Gospel histories, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... all read The Gold Bug, and know something of the method by which a solution is obtained by that simplest of all ciphers, where a fixed character takes the place of each letter in the alphabet. ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... her own subconscious self," said the Tracer quietly. "Science has been forced to admit such things, and, as you know, we are on the verge of understanding the alphabet of some of the unknown forces which we ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... alphabet used in Ireland of which remains exist appears to have been the Ogam, which is found in numbers of stone inscriptions dating from about the third century of our era on. About 300 such inscriptions have already been found, most of them in the southwest of Ireland, but ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... education, a time scarcely sufficient to give them a relish for learning, and far inadequate to wide and profound researches. As soon as a young man has closed this period of study, and while he is at the beginning of the alphabet of science, he must betake himself to a profession, he must hurry through a few books,—which, by the way, are rarely original works, but compilations and abridgments,—and then must enter upon practice, and ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... book. It will then be well to clear the board of all but a single Piece, and practise with that until perfect in its movements; another, and then another, may be added, until the action of every one is as familiar as the alphabet. ...
— The Blue Book of Chess - Teaching the Rudiments of the Game, and Giving an Analysis - of All the Recognized Openings • Howard Staunton and "Modern Authorities"
... the Kami, letters of some kind must have been in use. Since then the matter has been much discussed. Caves used in ancient times as habitations or sepulchres and old shrines occasionally offer evidence in the form of symbols which, since they bear some resemblance to the letters of the Korean alphabet (onmuri), have been imagined to be at once the origin of the latter and the script of the Kami-no-yo (Age of the Kami). But such fancies are no longer seriously entertained. It is agreed that the so-called "letters" are nothing more than copies of marks produced ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... which from time to time had come to this woman during her seventeen years' occupancy of the chair in which she sat. Upon the flyleaf was inscribed "Aphorisms: by Eugenie Ram." It was her intent to publish this darling work when beneath each letter of the alphabet twelve aphorisms ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... plaintive; a plaintive grace informs the entire piece. The harmonization is far more wonderful, but to us the chord of the tenth and more remote intervals, seem no longer daring; modern composition has devilled the musical alphabet into the very caverns of the grotesque, yet there are harmonies in the last page of this study that still excite wonder. The fifteenth bar from the end is one that Richard Wagner might have made. From that bar to the close, every group is ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... it vexes, That thus on our labors stern CHRONOS should frown Should change our soft liquids to izzards and Xes, And turn true-love's alphabet all upside down! ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... everlasting trouble for me at home if my name was flourishin' in the papers gettin' an A.B.C. or D.A.M.N. or whatever the fixin' is. And I'd sooner have this"—slapping the German helmet that dangled at his belt—"than your whole darn alphabet o' initials. Don't forget what I told you about the dad an' those Schwartzeheimer friends o' his, the cousins o' which same friends I've been blowin' off the earth with bomb base-balls. Let it go at that, and never forget ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... brute could do it. How marvellous, then this adaptation! How wondrous the adaptation of everything, and how astonishing that any man, with all these things in view, can for one moment forbear to admit a God. Let him try a chance experiment. Let him take the letters of the alphabet and throw them about promiscuously and then see how long ere they would move of their own accord and arrange themselves into words and sentences. He may avail himself of the whole benefit of his scheme; he may have the advantage ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... probable that the various Berber dialects are the fragments of the language of those formidable, but doubtful, auxiliaries, which so often balanced and changed the fortune of Roman and Carthaginian arms. Of all these Numidian dialects, only one people has amongst them a native alphabet, the rest using Arabic characters: this people are the Touaricks. It is besides worthy of remark, that amongst all the African tribes of Central Africa, nay, every part of Africa, excepting the Coptic and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the brain-power alike of Indian and Eskimo; and no wonder, for it was a wooden leg, discovered by Anteek in what must have been the doctor's cabin—or a cabin which had been used for doctor's stuff and material. Like letters of the alphabet given in confusion for the purpose of being formed into words, this leg puzzled investigators because of their inevitable tendency to lead off on a wrong scent by assuming that the leg part was ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... stuff," he explains, "for in looking for the particular word or point that I want, I go over so many other words and points that I keep all the material fresh in my mind. No good points are buried in some forgotten scrapbook; I keep reading these things until they are as familiar to me as the alphabet." ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... flatly, declaring that it might have been written with her alphabet of ciphers, but was certainly none of hers. "There may have been designs against the Queen and for procuring my liberty," she said, "but I, shut up in close prison, was not aware of them, and how can I be made to answer for them? Only lately did I receive a letter asking ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pronoun. The relationship between the picture and the idea for which it is used is in this case through the sound of the name of the object depicted. That the early alphabets are of this type of rebus pictures appears in their names. The first three letters of the Hebrew alphabet, for example, are named, respectively, aleph which means ox, beth which means house, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park |
