"Vowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man's quality in respect to his affection and love is known to the angels. Also in the speech of celestial angels there are no hard consonants, and it rarely passes from one consonant to another without the interposition of a word beginning with a vowel. This is why in the Word the particle "and" is so often interposed, as can be seen by those who read the Word in the Hebrew, in which this particle is soft, beginning and ending with a vowel sound. Again, ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... in the aforesaid economical and nondescript 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 what the owner meant by "keeping ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... a semi-vowel written [lr] the sound of which in words of the masculine gender approaches l, in those of the neuter gender r. The o and u, and the t and d, are also frequently blended. The w has not the German but the soft English sound, as in we. The German ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... reader has remarked that the upright and independent vowel, which stands in the vowel-list between E and O, has formed the subject of the main part of these essays. How does that vowel feel this morning?—fresh, good-humored, and lively? The Roundabout lines, which fall from this pen, are correspondingly brisk ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... represented by A, it must be noted, has not always the same force or quantity, depending on an open or closed syllable and the position of the vowel ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... 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 ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... walking-stick as 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 ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... 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 buzz ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... 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
... Venus is chosen by Homer, picturing himself as Demodocus, to sing at the games in the court of Alcinous. Phaeacia is the Homeric island of Atlantis; an image of noble and wise government, concealed, (how slightly!) merely by the change of a short vowel for a long one in the name of its queen; yet misunderstood by all later writers, (even by Horace, in his "pinguis, Phaeaxque"). That fable expresses the perpetual error of men in thinking that grace ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the velvety South of Ireland vowel-inflection. "We keep Wednesday for the Women's Laager, always. Many of them are so miserable, poor souls, about their husbands and sons and brothers who are in the trenches, or who have been killed, and then there are the children to be cared for and washed. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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
... 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 here, we have something remarkably like it,—as ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... him is that he attacked orthography at the wrong end. He meant well, but he, attacked the symptoms and not the cause of the disease. He ought to have gone to work on the alphabet. There's not a vowel in it with a definite value, and not a consonant that you can hitch anything to. Look at the "h's" distributed all around. There's "gherkin." What are you going to do with the "h" in that? What the devil's the use of "h" in gherkin, I'd like to know. It's one thing I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in 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
... the Greeks then pronounced the penultimate vowel according to the acute accenta; not as we slur it over. In old Hebrew we have the transliteration of four Greek words; in the languages of Hindostan many scores including names of places; and in Latin and Arabic ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... vowel A is formed by opening the mouth widely: A. Its vowels are to be given the sounds used in ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... I am beginning to perceive that his tastes are more modern, or, to speak more correctly, they tend to less archaic and more interesting studies. Then again I have read somewhere that the Hebrew characters, with their minute vowel-points, have driven blind many an enthusiastic scholar, and I fear these black Greek letters are becoming too much for my old sight. There now, dear reader, don't rush to the conclusion that this is just what you anticipated; you ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... the fault was all on one side, Miss Hethencourt," summed up the Captain, speaking in guttural consonant and flattened vowel from suppressed emotion. "The—er—the plaintiff must have approached the dog as he was ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... give the most apparent facts, which to children are the most interesting facts, in the natural history of the animal. This plan contemplates instruction in pronunciation in connection with exercises in breathing, in the elementary sounds of words both consonant and vowel, in the names of letters, in writing and drawing, to all of which may be added something of natural history. It is of course to be understood that such exercises would be extended over many lessons, be subject to frequent reviews, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... themselves and are questioned by the leader of the game and must answer without bringing in a word containing a forbidden vowel. Say the vowel "a" is forbidden, the leader asks—"Are you fond of playing the piano?" The answer "Yes, very much," would be correct as the words do not contain the letter "a." But if the answer were—"Yes, and I am fond of singing too," the speaker would have to pay a forfeit. Any vowel ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... repetition. On 4 cards, one of these vowels appears 21 times and each of the three others 9 times; on 8 cards, one appears 18 times and every one of the three others 10 times; on 8 cards, one appears 15 times and each of the others 11 times; and finally, on 4 cards one vowel appears 16 times, each of the three others 8 times, and besides them 8 different consonants are mixed in. The person to be tested has to distribute these 24 cards as quickly as possible in 4 piles, in such a way that in the first pile are placed all cards in which the letter A is ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... Technica was designed as an artificial language to remember numbers, as of the eras, or dates of history. This was done by substituting one consonant and one vowel for each figure of the ten cyphers used in arithmetic, and by composing words of these letters; which words Mr. Grey makes into hexameter verses, and produces an audible jargon, which is to be committed ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... translators had before them much older and more perfect MSS. than any that survived to the time of the masoretic recension, when an attempt was made to give uniformity to the readings and renderings of the Hebrew text by means of the vowel points, diacritical signs, terminal letters, etc., all of which are now subject to rejection by the best ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... and to the general anthropologist. We are informed that the Bantu languages "constitute a very distinct type of speech which, as contrasted with others amongst the group of Negro tongues, is remarkable as a rule for Italian melodiousness, simplicity and frequency of its vowel sounds, and the comparative ease with which its exemplars can be acquired and spoken by Europeans" (p. 15). "This one Negro language family now covers the whole of the southern third of Africa, with the exception of very small areas in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... precedes the following symbols: ''/^ to mark accents in Greek. These in turn Precede the vowel they refer to. ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... (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, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... as possible, and hence they looked about for some system which could be readily grasped by these ignorant people. It was necessary that the system be absolutely phonetic and understood easily. By adapting the system used in shorthand, of putting the vowel marks in different positions by the side of the consonant signs, Mr. Pollard and his assistant found that they could solve their problem. The signs for the consonants are larger than the vowel signs, and the position of the latter by the side of the former ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... 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 have generally ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... was flexible and sonorous, the sense largely depending upon inflection, copious in vowel sounds, abounding in metaphor; affording constant opportunity for the ingenious combination and construction of words to image delicate, and varying shades of thought, and to express vehement manifestations of passion; admitting ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... more words correspond from their accented vowel on, they are said to rhyme: Pferde—Erde. The rhyming syllable must carry at least a secondary accent: Hiligkit—Zit. Rhymes of one syllable are called masculine, of two syllables feminine. According to their degree of perfection ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... believe that the prudent and practical Chaucer would have placed his verse, intended for general reception, in the jeopardy of a reader's discretion for determining when the verse required the sounding, and when the silence, of a vowel, by its nature free to be sounded or left silent, as exigency might require. But he misapprehends the proposed remedy; and the discretion which he supposes is not given. In the two languages from which ours is immediately derived, the Anglo-Saxon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... glanced between the trees as they passed the cottage door. Then came the Magistrate's Clerk, faultlessly attired, with florid face and glittering eyeglass, who, in an ambitious youth, finding his name too suggestive of plebeian blood, changed a vowel in it, and thereby gave an aristocratic flavour to the title of his partnership, and who acquired, with this new dignity, the taste for a monocle, a horse, and a good cigar. Following were the members ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... 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 handle of ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... or phrases are capitalized. A few obvious errors have been corrected. Many German names with umlauts have had the umlaut replaced with an 'e' following the vowel (according to standard form) due to the limitations of ASCII. These names ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... tone emission is, first of all, the cultivation of the breath prop, then attacking the vowel sound o o in the medium voice, which requires a low position of the larynx, and exercises on the ascending scale until the higher notes have been brought down, as it were, and gain some of the body and support of the lower ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... word, it is little doubtful that Om is but an older and contracted form of the common Sanskrit word evam ("thus"), which, coming from the pronominal base "a," in some derivations changed to "e," may have at one time occurred in the form avam, when, by the elision of the vowel following a, for which there are numerous analogies in Sanskrit, vum would become aum, and hence, according to the ordinary phonetic laws of the language, Om. This etymology of the word, however, seems ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... by 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 ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... lower animals is a vowel form of speech. It lacks the consonantal elements, the characteristic of articulation. In this man seems to have at first agreed with them. The infant begins its vocal utterances with simple cries; only at a later age does it begin to ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... 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 ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... book that follows contains many macron-ized characters, vowels with a horizontal bar above them. The macron indicates that the vowel is pronounced long, e.g. a-macron is pronounced as in "way". Since these characters are Unicode, they cannot be displayed in a Latin1/ISO-8859 file. They have been indicated as in the line below. In the UTF8 version of this file, the actual characters have been used. The HTML ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... Harrowing as it was, the sounds were almost like a recitation of the alphabet. A woman who had adopted me as her nephew said they called it the "Ue haaneinei" That, literally, is "to make a weeping on the side." The etiquette of it was intricate and precise. Each vowel was memorized with exactness. It ran, as my adopted aunt repeated it over her ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... from the Halbat al-Kumayt (chapt. xiv.) or from Al-Mas'udi (chapt. cxi.). See the French translation, vol. vi. p. 340. I am at pains to understand why M. C. Barbier de Maynard writes "Rechid" with an accented vowel; although French delicacy made him render, by "fils de courtisane," the expression in the text, "O biter of thy mother's enlarged (or uncircumcised) ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... 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, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... school for a boy of six without the language. But the national linguistic gift inherent in the Dutch race came to the boy's rescue, and as the roots of the Anglo-Saxon lie in the Frisian tongue, and thus in the language of his native country, Edward soon found that with a change of vowel here and there the English language was not so difficult of conquest. At all events, he ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... Danish poets were, for the most part, extremely rude in their versification. Their stanzas of four or two lines have not the full rhyme of vowel and consonant, but merely what the Spaniards call the "assonante," or vowel rhyme, and attention seldom seems to have been paid to the number of feet on which the lines moved along. But, however defective their poetry ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... refrain forming the close to each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt, and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel in connection with r as the most ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... of severity, 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... and capitalization in the primary text are unchanged. The distinction between u (vowel) and v (consonant) is as in the original. Typographical errors are listed at the end of ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... develop a clear tone of voice, let pupils practice, in concert, upon some of the open vowel sounds, using such words ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... make a continuous sound which she called singing. The only words she had learned to pronounce with any degree of distinctness previous to March, 1890, were PAPA, MAMMA, BABY, SISTER. These words she had caught without instruction from the lips of friends. It will be seen that they contain three vowel and six consonant elements, and these formed the foundation for her first ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Why called Consonants? Because they cannot be used alone in a word, but must be connected with a Vowel. ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... Spanish-English form is perhaps the prettier. I am sorry to say that the poet, to get a rhyme, sometimes spells it "Urracle," which is not pretty. Southey's "Queen Orraca" seems to me to have changed her vowel ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... without understanding their talk, for when printed the Andalusian dialect varies as far from the Castilian as, say, the Venetian varies from the Tuscan, and when spoken, more. It may then be reduced almost wholly to vowel sounds, and from the lips of some speakers it is really no more consonantal than if it came from the beaks of birds. They do not lisp the soft c or the z, as the Castilians do, but hiss them, and lisp the s instead, as the reader will find amusingly noted in the Sevillian ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... Fleet Street. 1852. Mr. Reach was very particular about the pronunciation of his name. Being a native of Inverness, the last vowel was guttural. One day, dining with Douglas Jerrold, who insisted on addressing him as Mr. Reek or Reech, "No," said the other; "my name is neither Reek nor Reech,but Reach," "Very well," said Jerrold, "Mr. Reach will you ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... Chaucer to remove. Suspecting that the broader sounds are the older, we may surmise that remove and food have retained their old sounds, and that cook, once coke, would have rhymed to our Luke, the vowel being brought a little nearer, perhaps, to the o in our present coke, the fuel, probably so called as used by cooks. If this be so, the Chief Justice Cook[614] of our lawyers, and the Coke (pronounced like the fuel) of the greater part of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... eleventh and twelfth centuries. But it has passed from copy to copy in the course of generations. The methods of versification change, and, after line 2647, "there are traces of change in the language. The word co, followed by a vowel, hitherto frequent, never again reappears. The vowel i, of li, nominative masculine of the article" (li Reis, "the king"), "never occurs in the text after line 2647. Up to that point it is elided or not at pleasure.... There is a progressive tendency ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... printed as vowels with a line over them, were used in the original to indicate a vowel followed by an 'm' or 'n'. They have been expanded as follows (the contraction is marked by [] ...
— A Declaration of the Causes, which mooved the chiefe Commanders of the Nauie of her most excellent Maiestie the Queene of England, in their voyage and expedition for Portingal, to take and arrest in t • Anonymous
... 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
... so 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 two ideas in question: 1st, that of outstretched surface or thinness; and, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... plural of a noun or adjective, the rule appears to be to add le as a postfix, sometimes previously supplying a terminal vowel if required: Example: geta hand becomes getale in the plural: kuku foot, kukule: kutai yam, kutaile: ipi wife, ipile: kerne lad undergoing a certain ceremony, kernele: makaow mat, makaowle: bom fruit ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... open vowels in the lyrics—A, I or O. E is half open and U is closed. Going up on a closed vowel makes ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... of sound, notwithstanding its division into syllables by the organs of articulation—lips, tongue, etc.—should pour forth smoothly and uninterruptedly. The full value of each tone must be allotted to the vowel; the consonants which precede or end the syllables are pronounced quickly and distinctly. In declamatory singing, on the contrary, the consonants should be articulated with greater ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... short vowels; these typically occur as the first vowel in a Malay word (mostly e, but sometimes a, i, u). Letters with breve accents have been replaced with just ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... of Gaelic broke from Duncan, into the midst of which rushed another from Mrs Catanach, similar, but coarse in vowel and harsh ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... were following up the scythes as they chased the falling waves of grass, (falling as the waves fall on sickle-curved beaches; the foam-flowers dropping as the grass-flowers drop,—with sharp semivowel consonantal sounds,—frsh,—for that is the way the sea talks, and leaves all pure vowel-sounds for the winds to breathe over it, and all mutes to the unyielding earth,)—about this time of over-ripe midsummer, the life of Elsie seemed fullest of its malign and restless instincts. This was the period of the year when the Rockland ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the vowel i by bringing the jaws still closer to one another, and stretching the two corners of the mouth towards the ears; a, ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... observed, with an e, as his name (I beg his pardon for having misspelt it) was Thomson without the p; there being I know not what of dignity in the absence of the consonant, and the presence of the vowel, though mute. We soon found that both he and Mr. Browne lent these illustrious names to half a score of clubs, from the Athenaeum downward. We also gathered from his conversation that he resided somewhere in Gloucester Place or Devonshire Place, in Wimpole Street or Harley Street, ...
— The London Visitor • Mary Russell Mitford
... and hummed and subtly threatened. For the hundredth time he made a systematic list of recurrent symbols, noting again the puzzling similarity of the twisted signs, but no sign appeared frequently enough to do vowel work. ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... 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 ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... size shrinks to a failing, And loses half her grossness by curtailing. Faux pas are told in such a modest way,— "The affair of Colonel B—— with Mrs. A——" You must forgive them—for what is there, say, Which such a pliant Vowel must not grant To such a very pressing Consonant? Or who poetic justice dares dispute, When, mildly melting at a lover's suit, The wife's a Liquid, her good man a Mute? Even in the homelier scenes of honest life, The coarse-spun intercourse of man and wife, Initials ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... 3. The vowel-letters had nearly the same values as in Old English. Long vowels were often marked by (´). In this book long vowels are regularly marked by (¯)[1]. The following are the elementary vowels and diphthongs, with examples, and key-words ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... you deserved, either, Doctor von Kammacher," he said in his broad dialect, rich in vowel sounds, and recounted a number of cases, of which Frederick had not known, in which good had been repaid by evil tattle. "The people around Plassenberg are not fit for men like you and me. Men like you and me belong in America, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... timbre of an instrument is the vowel produced by the human mouth in any particular position. Each vowel appears to consist, physically, of certain high notes produced by the resonance of the mouth cavity. In the position for "ah", the cavity gives a certain tone; in the position for "ee" it gives a higher tone. Meanwhile, the pitch ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... for broad a (instead of 2 dots under it). & superscripted a & o (Spanish ordinals) before o for ligatures. A long vowel should have a straight line over it but I've shown them by using a colon : after them. Short vowels are shown by a grave accent mark after instead of a curved line over the letter. An equals sign after a word shows that the next 1 should start the next column. "Special SYSTEM Edition" ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... represent sequences that are phonetically identical to the forms above them, but which are transcribed differently to reflect morphological considerations; e.g., the form ague from the stem ague. The phonetic values of /au/, /uu/, and /ou/ are [[IPA: Open-mid back rounded vowel]:], [u:], ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... of the vowels as having had their "pure sound" in the Elizabethan age. We are not sure if we understand him rightly; but have they lost it? We English have the same vowel-sounds with other nations, but indicate them by different signs. Slight changes in orthoepy we cannot account for, except by pleading the general issue of custom. Why should foot and boot be sounded differently? Why food ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... slightly, he was still so tangled that he could do nothing except await whatever fate was in store for him. Two persons came into the room; he heard them speak sharply and knew then that they were Chinese; there was no mistaking the outlandish inflection of vowel and consonant. In a second rough hands were laid upon him and he was dragged away from the wall. He gave a few last futile wrenches and then lay still, face down, on ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... as 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 ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... between the first consonant and the succeeding vowel; as in endeavouring to pronounce the word parable, the p is voluntarily repeated again and again, but the remainder of the word does not follow, because the association between it and the next ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... identical or closely similar sounds. According to the circumstances of the identical or similar sounds, four varieties are distinguishable: (1) alliteration, or initial rime, when the sounds at the beginning of accented syllables agree, as tale, attune; (2) consonance, when the vowel sounds differ and the final consonantal sounds agree, as tale, pull; (3) assonance, when the vowel sounds agree and the consonants differ, as tale, pain; and (4) rime proper, when both the vowels and the final consonants agree, as ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... theories about spelling, but also that 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 which the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... true, as your sublime highness's discrimination has observed, that his enunciation, even to those who know the language, may have some appearance of indistinctness, because he is defective in the vowel-points; but we cannot help it, for all our books are unpointed. In this, which, indeed, we consider a matter of little importance, we do not pretend to compete with the Jews, who teach theirs from pointed books. If your sublime highness ever heard a bear read more articulately than ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... serious encouragement. She ought to do better. A poor honourable is no catch, and I cannot imagine any liking in the case, for take away his rants, and the poor baron has nothing. What a difference a vowel makes! If his rents were but equal to his rants! Your cousin Edmund moves slowly; detained, perchance, by parish duties. There may be some old woman at Thornton Lacey to be converted. I am unwilling to fancy myself ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... 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
... [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, Assyr. Gram. ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... working up my Handbook of Arabic. I also design a skeleton dictionary of Arabic-English. I have got a valuable book from Algiers (if it had but vowel points!). But I cannot publish until I have money to spare. Meanwhile I work hard to mature ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... 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 ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... be represented in the latin-1 character set are shown as: [oe] oe ligature [e,] "e caudata": equivalent to ae or ae [u] [e] vowel with circumflex (also a and o) ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... the difficulty of drawing them, which takes time and patience, I would almost say that they are more suitable than the Latin alphabet. The ancient Egyptian had our vowels; our o, which is only final and is not like that of the Spanish, which is a vowel between o and u. Like us, the Egyptians lacked the true sound of e, and in their language are found our ha and kha, which we do not have in the Latin alphabet such as is used in Spanish. For example, in this word mukha," he went on, pointing to the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... words are expressed by the letters which in English correspond nearest to those sounds. There are no mute vowels. The letter a is invariably sounded as in the English word far. The emphasis is marked by an accent over the last vowel of the accented syllable. Ee and oo, whether accented or not, always ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... at the north side of the cathedral has been placed a statue of Richard Hooker, the theologian (1553-1600), author of "The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity." The "Judicious Hooker" was born in Exeter, and was a nephew of John Vowel, alias Hoker, Chamberlain and Historian ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... this subject. The word, he avers, is Phoenician: from maphula, one of those kinds of bread named as such by Athenaeus. "It was a cake," says Athenaeus, "baked on a hearth or griddle." He derives this by taking away the final vowel, and then changing l for n; thus: "maphula," ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... appear obvious at first sight how a vowel should be employed, not to represent a vocal sound, but to modify an articulation. Yet examples are to be found in modern languages. Thus, in the English words, George, sergeant, the e has no other effect than to give g its soft sound; and in guest, guide, the u only ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... for Colonel House to say no. He might go so far as to utter the first letter of that indispensable monosyllable; but before he accomplished the vowel, his mind would turn to some happy "formula" passing midway between no and yes. He was fertile in these expedients. Daily he would talk of some new "formula," for Fiume, for Dantzig, for the Saar Valley, for the occupation of the Rhine, for Shantung, always happily, always ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... 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, ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... to be referred to again and again, and the diacritical marks carefully taught. Instruction in the vowel sounds is an excellent drill in articulation, while a knowledge of the diacritical marks enables the pupil to master these sounds for ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... patient and had good memories, but found it hard to think. I judge that they had rarely been expected or taught to think for themselves. Arithmetic was hard for them. Reading in Spanish—where each letter, vowel or consonant has, in general, but one sound and there are no silent letters—was very easy. But reading and spelling in English—where they could not know what sound to give to a letter, and what letters had no sound—was most trying. However, they did, even in reading ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 4, October, 1900 • Various
... symbol [] followed by a vowel represents a macron. The symbol [)] followed by a vowel represents ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... formed and ripened by familiarity with the harmonies of the Italian language. In his Tractate on Education addressed to Mr. Hartlib, he recommends that boys should be instructed in the Italian pronunciation of vowel sounds, in order to give sonorousness and dignity to elocution. This slight indication supplies us with a key to the method of melodious structure employed by Milton in his blank verse. Those who have carefully studied the harmonies of the 'Paradise Lost,' know how all-important are the assonances ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... elements of the individual and nation, of the past and present, of the inward and outward, of the subject and object, of the notional and relational, of the root or unchanging part of the word and of the changing inflexion, if such a distinction be admitted, of the vowel and the consonant, of quantity and accent, of speech and writing, of poetry and prose. We observe also the reciprocal influence of sounds and conceptions on each other, like the connexion of body and mind; and further remark that ...
— Cratylus • Plato |
