"Linguistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... though certain general principles were observed in each period. There was a special uncertainty about the vowels, which will be easily appreciated by those who are familiar with Cornish English. Modern writers of all languages prefer consistent spelling, and to modern learners, whose object is linguistic rather than philological, a fairly regular system of orthography is almost a necessity. The present system is not the phonetic ideal of “one sound to each symbol, and one symbol for each sound,” ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... in the treatment of objective life, swiftness of analogy, affects the Polynesian in two ways: the first is pictorial and plays upon a likeness between objects or describes an idea or mood in metaphorical terms; the second is a mere linguistic play upon words. Much nomenclature is merely a quick picturing which fastens attention upon the special feature that attracts attention; ideas are naturally reinforced by some simple analogy. I recall ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... myself, I was not deficient in linguistic knowledge. In my family the only language made use of was French. M. Papadopoulos at an early age taught me Greek, which in the East is as important as French in the West. The Germanic tongues terrified me at first, the peoples of Pelasgic origin ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... of the Desire World, there is the same diversity of tongues as on earth, and the so-called "dead" of one nation find it impossible to converse with those who lived in another country. Hence linguistic accomplishments are of great value to the "Invisible Helpers", of whom we shall hear later, as their sphere of usefulness is ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... more, for the sake of completeness in giving a category of causes, we should call attention to the fact acknowledged by all thorough students of this subject, namely, that, other things being equal, it is particularly the individual who has linguistic abilities, who is especially good at verbal composition, that seems to have most incentive to dally with the truth. But beyond this we would insist that a combination of verbal ability with proportionate mental defects in other fields gives a make-up ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... such as the heavenly bodies and the rivers, were regarded as divine and had names in common with their gods, this to Prodicus would be a specially attractive subject for speculation. It is plainly shown by his instances that it is linguistic observations of this kind which were the starting-point of his theory concerning the origin of the conceptions of ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... he developed exceptional physical powers, and remarkable linguistic facility. He succeeded to the throne at the age of fifteen, in 1697. Within the year he declared himself of age, and asserted his position as king; and the neighbouring powers at once resolved to take advantage of the Swedish monarch's youth—the kings Christian of Denmark, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... these is the excessive time given to other languages just at the psychological period of greatest linguistic plasticity and capacity for growth. School invention and tradition is so inveterate that it is hard for us to understand that there is little educational value—and perhaps it is deeducational—to learn to tell the time of day or name a spade in several different tongues ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... killed at Paardeberg while I was in Ladysmith, he was my senior by nearly a year, Philip, who is now Earl Ladislaw and who was about eighteen months younger than I, Mary, my contemporary within eight days, and Guy, whom we regarded as a baby and who was called, apparently on account of some early linguistic efforts, "Brugglesmith." He did his best to avenge his juniority as time passed on by an enormous length of limb. I had more imagination than Maxton and was a good deal better read, so that Mary and I dominated most of the games of ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... of the most fertile; A.W. Schlegel and his school, when they transplanted all the poetry of other nations to Germany by means of imitations which are real wonders of assimilation; Frederick Schlegel, when, in the Wisdom of the Hindoos he opened out that vast field of comparative linguistic science, which Bopp and so many others have since cultivated with such success; Alexander von Humboldt and Karl Ritter, when they gave a new life to geography by showing the earth in its growth and development and coherence; W. von Humboldt, when he established the laws of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... fall and early winter, shortly after Company "A" had been relieved at Ust Padenga, we were stationed in the village of Shegovari. Here we had considerable leisure at our disposal and consequently the writer began devoting more time to his linguistic studies. Difficult as the language seems to be upon one's first introduction to it, it was not long before I was able to understand much of what was said to me, and to express myself in a vague roundabout way. In the latter operation I was much assisted by a peculiar faculty ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... primitive people in the Philippine Archipelago, except the Negrito, is from that same old tongue. Mr. Homer B. Hulbert[41] has recorded vocabularies of ten groups of people in Formosa; and those vocabularies show that the people belong to the same great linguistic family as the Bontoc Igorot. Mr. Hulbert believes that the language of Korea is originally of the same stock as that of Formosa. In concluding his article ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... mouth, Lauderdale concealed a power of crafty insinuation in which he repeated some of the dexterity of his kinsman of a former generation, Maitland of Lethington, known in the Courts of Elizabeth and James VI. as "the Chameleon." To natural talent Lauderdale added a scholarship and linguistic acquirements which were rare in his age. Intellectually he towered above his contemporaries. Creeds and principles, for which his countrymen were ready to do battle or to die, were for Lauderdale mere playthings in the game of intrigue. The Covenant, the orthodox standards ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... To this linguistic evidence of authenticity we can add archaeological evidence. The discoveries of the last thirty years have greatly confirmed the accuracy of the writer in points where a writer of the 2nd century would have betrayed his ignorance. In fact, we are able to compare his accuracy with the inaccuracy ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... to the Croats and the Serbs. It remained only for the Serbs to electrify the Jugo-Slavs—"to avenge Kossovo with Kumanovo"—in order to cement their loyalty to the regenerated Serbs. Religious differences, political rivalries, linguistic quibbles, and the petty foibles of centuries appeared to be forgotten in the three short years which elapsed from Kumanovo to the destruction of Serbia in 1915. The Greater Serbia idea had really perished in 1915, as ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... same way. I like company. I had intended going on to-night, but this Cologne one hears so much about is disappointingly dull, isn't it? Nothing to see." They conversed in German to Kirtley's linguistic satisfaction. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... I suggest that the theory of an unintentional mistake throws the best light upon the case? For any conversation with my accuser was either in German or English. You know my German linguistic ability and the error that might be made there; and as for English, I challenge my accuser to understand three consecutive sentences ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... The Tarahumari Indians of the Sierra of Chihuahua, Mexico, call the sun au-nau-ru-a-mi, "high father," and the moon, je-ru-a-mi, "high mother." The Tupi Indians of Brazil term the moon jacy, "our mother," and the same name occurs in the Omagua and other members of this linguistic stock. The Muzo Indians believe that the sun is their father and the moon their mother ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... but half the story. A glance at the runes had shown an awful double consonant, and, as if that were not enough, an appalling modified vowel. By a single word scratched by the untutored hand of a rude warrior the most ingenious linguistic hypothesis of our times was shattered beyond hope of repair. The spearhead was Lombard, and Lombard, dire reflection to one who had gained fame by maintaining the contrary, belonged to the West Germanic group of the Teutonic tongues. Wild thoughts ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... H., and Haddon, A. C., "A Study of the Languages of Torres Straits," Proc. Roy. Irish Acad., 3rd ser., IV., 1897, p. 509). Early in 1894, Mr. Ray read a paper before the Anthropological Institute (Journ. Anth. Inst., XXIV., p. 15), in which he adhered to our former discrimination of two linguistic stocks and added a third type of language composed of a mixture of the other two, for which he proposed the name Melano-Papuan. These languages, according to Mr. Ray, occur in the Trobriands, Woodlarks and the Louisiades, ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... follow him in this path; for in the present state of linguistic chaos and decomposition few writers have the necessary knowledge of Russian, the taste and the sense of measure, to write anything like his pure and flexible Russian. In the hands of others it degenerates into slang, or into some personal jargon closely related ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... West-Vlaanderen (West Flanders); Wallonia* region (five provinces): Brabant Wallon (Walloon Brabant), Hainaut, Liege, Luxembourg, Namur note: as a result of the 1993 constitutional revision that furthered devolution into a federal state, there are now three levels of government (federal, regional, and linguistic community) with ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... generation, were couched in the idiom of the psalmist, yet the structure of the language underwent no change. "The development of the neo-Hebraic idiom from the ancient Hebrew," a distinguished modern ethnographer justly says, "confirms, by linguistic evidence, the plasticity, the logical acumen, the comprehensive and at the same time versatile intellectuality of the Jewish race. By the ingenious compounding of words, by investing old expressions with new meanings, and adapting the material offered by alien or related languages ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... and extent of the original tribe whence the Indo-European languages have sprung, we can only speculate. It probably was not large, and very likely formed a compact racial and linguistic unit for centuries, possibly for ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... American and English would remain the same tongue, and that at the end of the nineteenth century there would not be the slightest perceptible cleavage, or threat of ultimate divergence. No doubt there were forces obviously tending to preserve the linguistic unity of the two nations. There was the English Bible for one thing, and there was the whole body of English literature. The Americans, it might have been said, could scarcely be so foolish as deliberately to renounce their spiritual birthright, or let it drift ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... said into English, the translation turns out to be but a sonorous paraphrase. Her French was of that mixed creole sort, a blending of linguistic elegance and patois, impossible to imitate. Like herself it was beautiful, crude, fascinating, and something in it impressed itself as unimpeachable, despite the broken and incongruous diction. Rene felt his soul cowering, even slinking; but he fairly ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... Athapascan family, which, according to the consensus of opinion, had its origin in the far North, where many tribes of the family still live. Based on the creation legends of the Navaho and on known historical events, the advent of the southern branch of this linguistic group—the Navaho and the Apache tribes—has been fixed in the general region in which they now have their home, at about the time of the discovery of America. Contrary to this conclusion, however, the legend of their genesis gives no hint of an origin in other ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... to define the term race as applied to the subdivisions of mankind, for valid criteria are lacking. Such classifications as have been attempted, now upon a historical, now upon a linguistic, and now upon an anthropological basis, are extremely inconsistent one with another, and ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... vernacular; dialect; idiom, phraseology, diction; argot, flash, slang, lingo, cant, jargon, gibberish; Volapuk, pasilaly, Esperanto. Associated Words: lingual, linguistic, linguist, linguistics, philology, philologist, philological, polyglot, glottology, glossology, paleography, glossologist, monoglot, grammar grammarian, chrestomathy, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... James Douie refers to the fact that the area treated in this volume—just one quarter of a million square miles—is comparable to that of Austria-Hungary. The comparison might be extended; for on ethnographical, linguistic and physical grounds, the geographical unit now treated is just as homogeneous in composition as the Dual Monarchy. It is only in the political sense and by force of the ruling classes, temporarily united in one monarch, that the term Osterreichisch ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... could readily speak: French, German, Italian, Greek, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Bavarian, Japanese, Hindustanee, Russian and Mexican! He was a lexicon, Such as you seldom will see. His knowledge linguistic gave Ollendorff fits, And brought a hot flush to ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... forced to publish his odes in small provincial papers, since no well-established journal would admit so scrannel an expression of views however exalted.[1] But the translation of the Koran was the greatest linguistic feat, and Tekin Alp, the most prominent exponent of Nationalism, refers to it as one of the noblest tasks undertaken by the new movement. It mattered not at all that by religious ordinance the translation ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... Italic races (Romans, Italians, French), the Slavic races (Russian, Polish, Bohemian), the Teutonic races of England and the Continent, and the Keltic races. These are hence alike called the Indo-European races; and as the same linguistic roots are found in their languages and in the Zend-Avesta, we infer that the ancient Persians, or inhabitants of Iran, belonged to the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... scholars in England who could do justice to this picture of the mediaeval Arab. Captain Burton is perhaps the only one who joins to the necessary linguistic knowledge that varied practical experience of Eastern life which alone in many cases can supply the true meaning of a troublesome passage or an accurate comment upon it. His aim is to make the book in its English dress not only absolutely literal in text but Oriental in tone and colour. He ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... peculiarities of the cultivated plants of America point to its isolation from all the rest of the world; an isolation which is further established by a radical dissimilarity of all American languages from Old World linguistic stocks. In no language of the New World, for example, is there a vestige of Hebrew, which would support the cherished theory of the migration to this continent of the lost tribes of Israel; nor is there a suggestion of any linguistic element to indicate connection ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... the writing suggests that it can hardly have been inscribed as late as the Kassite Dynasty, since two or three signs exhibit more archaic forms than occur on any tablets of that period;(2) and such linguistic corruptions as have been noted in its text may well be accounted for by the process of decay which must have already affected the Sumerian language at the time of the later kings of Nisin. Moreover, the tablet bears a close resemblance ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... the chant which Taillefer sang. The poem has vigor and freshness; it is not without pathos. But M. Vitet is not satisfied with seeing in it a document of some poetic value, and of very high historic and linguistic value; he sees in it a grand and beautiful work, a monument of epic genius. In its general design he finds the grandiose conception, in its details he finds the constant union of simplicity with greatness, which are the marks, he truly says, of the genuine epic, and distinguish it from the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... rule, it is well to give close critical scrutiny to all colloquial phrases and expressions of doubtful parsing, as well as to all words and usages which have a strained or unfamiliar sound. The human memory is not to be trusted too far, and most minds harbour a considerable number of slight linguistic faults and inelegancies picked up from random discourse or from the pages of newspapers, magazines, and ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... and glide into X-rays and recent physical speculations; others may think of blue ribbons, or of the blue flowers on a friend's hat, and proceed on lines of personal reminiscence. To others, again, etymology and linguistic thoughts may be suggested; or blue may be 'apperceived' as a synonym for melancholy, and a train of associates connected with morbid psychology may proceed to ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... federated in the then Victoria University of the north. It was a really surprising feat for so young a man—he was little over twenty-five when appointed—to have accomplished in so short a time; the more so as he was working single-handed: in other words, was doing unaided the work, both literary and linguistic, which in other colleges was commonly distributed between two or three. And I speak with intimate knowledge when I say that the Leeds students who presented themselves for their Honours Degree at the end of that time bore every mark of having ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... knowledge is of chiefest value both for the guidance of conduct and for the discipline of mind. At the same time we must not fall into the Spencerian error of identifying science "with the study of surrounding phenomena," and in making the antithesis between science and linguistic studies one between dealing with real things on the one hand, and mere words ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... The family had assembled, Anne a little timid before new learning, Lydia sitting on the edge of her chair determined to be phenomenal because Jeffrey must be pleased, and even Mary Nellen with writing pads and pencils at the table to scrape up such of the linguistic leavings as they might. At nine o'clock the general attention began to relax, and Lydia widely yawned. Jeffrey, looking at her, caught the soft redness of her mouth and thought, forgetful of Circe's island where he had taken refuge, how sweet the ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... special reference to the wants of the collector, being printed on bond paper and bound in flexible cloth. It was widely distributed and, like that of Mr. Gibbs, resulted in the collection of valuable linguistic material. ...
— Catalogue Of Linguistic Manuscripts In The Library Of The Bureau Of Ethnology. (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (Pages 553-578)) • James Constantine Pilling
... negation of Pantheism, because, if God is not ourselves, there is something other than God. But the man who deliberately justified the loose phraseology of the Bible about infinite Being, by the plea that it was language "thrown out" at an object infinitely transcending linguistic expression, ought not himself to be pinned to the implications logically deducible from his own words "thrown out" at the same transcendant object. And, though Matthew Arnold was too literary to be a Pantheist, ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... not, as in the Priestly Code, the great day of atonement. This led Graf to regard Ezekiel himself as the author of this collection of laws in Leviticus; and Colenso and Kayser followed him. But this is out of the question; notwithstanding the numerous points of contact both in linguistic and material respects, the agreement is by no means complete. Ezekiel knows no seed of Aaron, and no wine at the sacrifices (Leviticus xxiii. 13); his festival legislation shows considerable differences, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the linguistic standard of the world. "I suppose if she hadn't allowed him a great deal of his own way he'd have looked ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... as indeed throughout the poem, the main difficulties with which we meet depend far more on interpretation than on the mere "construing" of the words; and even if it were otherwise, all purely linguistic difficulties have been so fully dealt with over and over again in commentaries and translations that it would, as has been said, be quite superfluous to enter here upon any discussion of them. The ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... with a lighter step and a lighter heart than in many a day. The parrot had learned to speak Canadian French to the extent of demanding his crackers and water in the lingo of the habitant. Whether he will yet stretch his linguistic acquirements to the learning of Iroquois I shall not say. It is at least possible. The two are inseparable. The last time I went to see them, no one answered my knock on the door-jamb. I raised the curtain that ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... thousand francs a night for a bedroom and five louis for a glass of beer. Now, in order to derive such profit from the Anglo-Saxon a knowledge of English was indispensable. He resolved to learn the language. How he did so, except by sheer effrontery, taking linguistic toll of frequenters of the cafe, would be a mystery to anyone unacquainted with Aristide. But to his friends his mastery of the English tongue in such circumstances is comprehensible. To Aristide the impossible was ever the ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... obtained a rich fund of information concerning the arts, institutions, traditions, and beliefs of the Indians with whom he was brought into daily contact. In August, 1873, his field work was interrupted by illness, and he returned to his home in Maryland and assumed parish work, meantime continuing his linguistic studies. In July, 1878, he was induced by Major Powell to resume field researches among the aborigines, and repaired to the Omaha reservation, in Nebraska, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, where he greatly increased ...
— Siouan Sociology • James Owen Dorsey
... from Spain to seek refuge in the Papal States, and took up residence at Cesena. There he began work on a tremendous universal history of the spiritual development of man, into which he wove the results of his philosophical, social and linguistic studies. These last were of particular importance, and Hervas is regarded as the true founder of the science of linguistics and comparative philology. In 1785 he published the eighteenth volume of his massive ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... had not arrived at that point; what some people call the "stilted" forms and phrases of fifty or almost a hundred years earlier clung to her still. The resulting lingo is far better than that part of the lingo of to-day where literary and linguistic good manners have been forgotten altogether: but it is distinctly deficient in ease. There are endless flourishes and periphrases—the colloquialisms which Swift and others had denounced (and quite properly) in their ugliest and vulgarest forms are ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... was particularly objectionable at the Boosters' Club lunch next day. They were addressed by a congressman who had just returned from an exhaustive three-months study of the finances, ethnology, political systems, linguistic divisions, mineral resources, and agriculture of Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, and Bulgaria. He told them all about those subjects, together with three funny stories about European misconceptions of ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... very remarkable, but the same sort of overlapping and working with large units can be duplicated in many linguistic performances that every one makes. In reading aloud, the eyes keep well ahead of the voice, and seeing, understanding and pronouncing are all applied simultaneously to different words of the passage read. In talking, the ideas ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... to illustrate the classical authors he had been reading; and the result had been a want of mental balance; he knew nothing of the modern world or the movement of European history; the whole education had in fact been linguistic and literary; it had sacrificed everything to accuracy, and to the consideration of niceties of expression. It might have been urged that this was in itself a training in the art of verbal expression; but here it seemed to Hugh that the whole of the training had confined itself to the momentary ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... I thought that the circumstances which moulded that self would be of far greater interest than the self itself. Of course all the modifications that men now undergo are nothing if compared to the early modifications which produced what we speak of as racial, linguistic, or even national peculiarities. That we are English or German, that we are white or black, nay, if you like, that we are human beings at all, all this has modified our self, or our germ-plasm, far more powerfully than anything that can happen to ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... this tale, I could wish for a pen supernally dipped, or for a metaphysician's plating to my vernacular, or for the linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or maybe just a neurologist's chart of ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... work is to serve as an introduction to the study of the historical development of the English language. The scope of the book is sufficient to give the student an insight into the main linguistic phenomena. While the method of discussion is concise, care has been taken to include all words the history of which bears on the development of the language at large. The authors have, in the first place, traced back to the older periods loanwords of ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... as to individual poems but also as to poets. Thus I felt that I must exclude Novalis, Hoelderlin, Brentano, Annette von Droste, Nietzsche and Dehmel. My standard of difficulty—aside from matters purely linguistic—was: Could a similar poem in English be read and appreciated by the same class of students? Moreover I tried out in a class of fourth semester German all poems that seemed to offer special difficulties and have made use of ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... ever saw; one might have imagined himself thrown back into the days of the Lancasters. The thatched inn had a hard stone floor, with a layer of loose sand scattered over it as a carpet in the bedroom. My linguistic qualities were put to a severe test in talking with the landlady. But the cable operators were pleasing and intelligent young gentlemen, and I had no difficulty in making them understand how the work was to ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... The best available criterion is the somewhat poor one of the distribution of the very various languages. Some curious lines of migration are indicated by the occurrence of the same type of language in widely separated regions, the most striking example being the appearance of one linguistic stock, the so-called Athapascan, away up in the north-west by the Alaska boundary; at one or two points in south-western Oregon and north-western California, where an absolute medley of languages prevails; and again in the southern highlands along the ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... anything mean—it's Mrs. Brimmer, I'll bet a cooky," said Mrs. Markham, whose linguistic deficiencies had debarred her from ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... Ninety-nine percent of the time Pat Pending talks like a normal human being. But ask him to explain the mechanism of one of his inventions and linguistic hell breaks loose. He begins jabbering like a schizophrenic parrot reading a Sanskrit dictionary backward! I sighed and surrendered all hope of ever actually learning how his great new discovery worked. I turned my thoughts to more ...
— Lighter Than You Think • Nelson Bond
... accomplishing much by the imperfections of the language by the aid of which their thinking was done; for science and philosophy have had to make a serviceable terminology by dint of long and arduous trial and practice, and linguistic processes fit for expressing general or abstract notions accurately grew up only through numberless failures and at the expense of much inaccurate thinking and loose talking. As in most of nature's processes, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... book. We have examined the best works on grammar that have been published recently here and in England. And we have done more. We have gone to the original source of all valid authority in our language— the best writers and speakers of it. That we might ascertain what present linguistic usage is, we chose fifty authors, now alive or living till recently, and have carefully read three hundred pages of each. We have minutely noted and recorded what these men by habitual use declare to be good English. Among the fifty are such men as Ruskin, Froude, Hamerton, Matthew Arnold, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... classes and by foreigners, but in Portugal the peasant has still deeper subtleties of speech at the end of his tongue. Add to this that he has a vocabulary of abuse before which the Spaniard or the California mule-driver would be silenced, and you have the extent of his linguistic accomplishments. This profane eloquence was an art imparted no doubt by the Moors. The refinements of syntax come from the Latin, to which Portuguese bears more affinity in form than any ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... be at hand in case a hasty change of mounts was required. By this time Honeyman knew the horses of each man's mount, so all we had to do was to sing out our horse, and Billy would have a rope on one and have him at hand before you could unsaddle a tired one. On account of our linguistic accomplishments, Quarternight and I were to be sent across the river to put the cattle in and otherwise assume control. On the Mexican side there was a single string of high brush fence on the lower ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is disheartening," he wrote in his Cambridge journal for 1851, "to see how little sympathy there is in the hearts of the young men here for freedom and great ideas." But his own sympathy never wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate the secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. He understood Italy and Spain, Holland and France and Germany. He had studied them on the lips of their living men and women and in the books where soldier and historian, priest and poet, had ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Mr. Britling very considerably. And both families set themselves to much unrecorded observation, much unspoken mutual criticism, and the exercise of great patience. It was tiresome for the English to be tied to a language that crippled all spontaneous talk; these linguistic gymnastics were fun to begin with, but soon they became very troublesome; and the Belgians suspected sensibilities in their hosts and a vast unwritten code of etiquette that did not exist; at first ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Oji; both languages, however, are mutually intelligible. [Footnote: Oji is also written Otschi, Tschi, Chwee, Twi, Tswi, Otyi, Tyi, or whatever German ingenuity can suggest. I can hardly explain why the late Keith Johnston (Africa) calls the linguistic family 'Ewe' (Ewhe, or properly Whegbe), after a small section of the country, Dahome, Whydah, &c. He was probably led to it by the publications of the Bale and other German missions.] The men are the usual ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... their softness, and he had the nervous grace of a thoroughbred—which is an Earth animal of particularly high breeding, raised for show purposes. He had the happy faculty of speaking the language of Earth without a trace of Zenian or Universal accent; the Zenians are exceeded by none in linguistic ability, which was a real accomplishment before these decadent days when native languages are slipping ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... Catiline came twenty-five years after the original version, and consisted largely of linguistic changes. Ibsen seems never to have completely disowned this play; it has been included in all the complete editions, whereas The Warrior's Barrow and Olaf Liljekrans appear only in the first complete edition, and were ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... Benares was reinforced in 1826 by the arrival of the Rev. James Robertson. He was a man of linguistic talent, and was full of plans for setting up the standard of the Cross and assailing the idolatry around him. He opened a number of schools in various parts of the city, and organized a system of Bible-reading ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... Such reluctance justifies itself. Nor would I attempt to back it by the cheap sanctions of prophecy. Nay, it is quite possible that Lowell's poems may live; I have no commands for futurity. Enough that he enriched the present with the example of a scholarly, linguistic, verbal love of literature, with a ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... much of his linguistic treasury Shakespeare shall be proved to have inherited ready-made—whatever scraps he may have stolen at the feast of languages—it is clear that he was an imperial creator of language, and lived while his mother-tongue was still plastic. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... must keep in our mind's eye the linguistic geography of Italy, just as we must remember the political geography of the peninsula in following Rome's territorial expansion. Let us think at the outset, then, of a little strip of flat country on the Tiber, ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... me, and I did not open my mouth for speech. Probably it never dawned upon them that I understood a word of their tongue. We Anglo-Saxons abroad have not a reputation for being polyglot, and I never advertise my own small linguistic attainments unless specially called upon to do so. I do not care particularly for the trouble of talking myself, and one scores sometimes by a taste for silence. I made rather a good point that way once in ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... indebtedness to Doctor Legge's "Chinese Classics," Archdeacon Gray's work on "China," Doolittle's "Social Life of the Chinese," Denys's "Chinese Folklore," Mayers's "Chinese Reader's Manual," Sir John Davis's "Poetry of the Chinese," as well as to the important linguistic, religious and topographical writings of Doctor Edkins of Peking, and particularly to the late Professor S. Wells Williams, of Yale College, whose work on the Middle Kingdom contains more information of value than any other ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... gone, and he is marooned at Salonica. He cannot face the overland route, and he cannot get home all the way by sea just yet. In spite of all his endeavours he cannot become a naturalised Greek and stay there, because of linguistic difficulties. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... hands were attacked by a momentary spasm. Only the Indian witnessed this sign of agitation; but the conversation was far above his learning and linguistic resources, ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... who opened it in his native tongue, would have to pass five years of his life between the Baltic and the Black Sea, the Carpathians and the Caucasus. Galician, Ruthenian, Polish, Magyar would be required as a linguistic basis, while variations of the same added to Russian and German for those who have served in one army or ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... too. I know Bengali. When Mademoiselle asked me that very question this noon I forgot Bengali. I learned one winter in India. I guess I'll telephone her—or no—I'd rather see her august face when I remind her of my humble linguistic existence. My name is Madeline Ayres. Now it's your turn," ended ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... kept in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin. It must have been written about the beginning of the twelfth century, for its compiler and writer, Moelmuire macCeilechair (Kelleher), is known to have been slain at Clonmacnois in the year 1106; some of its linguistic forms, however, are as old as the eighth century glosses. Unfortunately, LU.'s account of the Tain is incomplete at the beginning and the end, but the latter portion is made good by the closely related, though independent, version contained ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... was sent from Rome on April 21, 1915. It declared that these additional concessions failed to "repair the chief inconveniences of the present situation, either from the linguistic and ethnological or the military point of view." Austria, he pointed out, seemed determined to maintain positions on the frontier that were a perpetual threat to Italy. There were three more conversations between Baron Burian and the Italian Ambassador at Vienna before negotiations were ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... or subordinate branches of the Vedas are 1. Siksha, the science of proper articulation and pronunciation: 2. Chhandas, metre: 3. Vyakarana, linguistic analysis or grammar: 4. Nirukta, explanation of difficult Vedic words: 5. Jyotishtom, Astronomy, or rather the Vedic ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... (Luke 19:10). Our rule has been to endeavour to give to the terms of Jesus the connotation he meant them to carry. The scholar will linger over the "Son of Man"—a difficult phrase, with a literary and linguistic history that is very complicated. For the present purpose the significant words are at the other end of the sentence. What does Jesus mean by "lost"? It is a strong word, the value of which we have in some degree lost through familiarity. And whom would he describe as "lost"? We have ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... resembling those of Greece among Red Indians, Kaffirs, Eskimo, Samoyeds, Kamilaroi, Maoris, and Cahrocs. Now if Aryan myths arose from a 'disease' of Aryan languages, it certainly did seem an odd thing that myths so similar to these abounded where non-Aryan languages alone prevailed. Did a kind of linguistic measles affect all tongues alike, from Sanskrit to Choctaw, and everywhere produce the same ugly scars ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... Slavic race. This book was so favorably regarded in Russia that its author was recalled and employed in the civil service. He came to this country in 1849, and, after being employed on the staff of The New York Tribune, came to Washington, where his linguistic attainments and the aid of Charles Sumner secured for him a position as translator in the State Department, which he held from 1861 ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... forts, molto forte!" he observed, mixing French with Italian to show his linguistic accomplishments, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of the Mishnah as forming part of the Hebrew linguistic stock, but the moment was not propitious to the reform of the prevailing literary style suggested ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... dry or damp, we feel a confidence which not even the shock of political campaigns has been able to move. But in respect of grammar we find ourselves in a state of the most painful uncertainty. We have never regarded it as our beloved President's strong point, but we have considered any linguistic defect more than atoned for by the hearty, timely, sturdy, plain sense which appeals so directly and forcibly to the good sense of others. This book calls up a distressing doubt, and a doubt that strikes at vital interests. "Grammar," our President is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... them, but which are generally carried on without reference to principles governing the investigation of every organism and all organic life. I have in mind, particularly, the spread of literary and linguistic study in America during the last few decades, and the lack of a common standard of judgment among those who engage in such study. Most persons do not, in fact, discern the close, though not obvious, relation between investigation ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... English-speaking people the full treasury of epical beauty, folklore, and mythology comprised in The Kalevala, the national epic of the Finns. A brief description of this peculiar people, and of their ethical, linguistic, social, and religious life, seems to be called for here in order that the following poem ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... studied Latin, Greek, and four leading continental languages, as well as Persian, Syriac, Arabic, Sanscrit, and other tongues. In 1819 he wrote a letter to the Persian ambassador in that magnate's own language. After these linguistic contests, he early turned to mathematics, in which he was apparently self-taught; yet, in his seventeenth year he discovered an error in Laplace's Mecanique Celeste. He entered Trinity College where he won all kinds of distinctions, being ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... saying, 'Bheki will die at sight of water.' Not knowing who or what Bheki might be, they took her for a frog, who also was a pretty wench. Lastly, they made the story of Bheki's distinguished wedding and mysterious disappearance. For this interpretation, historical and linguistic evidence is not offered. When did a Sanskrit-speaking race live beside a great sea? How do we know that 'frog' was used as ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... write. Moreover, no philologist now supposes that any language has been deliberately invented; it has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps. (53. See some good remarks on this head by Prof. Whitney, in his 'Oriental and Linguistic Studies,' 1873, p. 354. He observes that the desire of communication between man is the living force, which, in the development of language, "works both consciously and unconsciously; consciously as regards the immediate ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... chance provided her with another resource, which enabled her to reassure her position in society. She became a secret police agent, and soon was one of their most valuable members. In addition to the proverbial charms and wit of a Polish woman, she also possessed high linguistic attainments, and she spoke Polish, Russian, French, German, English and Italian, almost equally fluently and correctly; then she had also that encyclopaedic polish, which impresses most people ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... not here inquire whether this condition of English is an evil. There are many cases where a complex and cunningly-devised machine, dexterously guided, can do that which the congenital hand fails to accomplish; but the computing, of our losses and gains, the striking of our linguistic balance, belongs elsewhere. Suffice it to say, that English is not a language which teaches itself by mere unreflecting usage. It can only be mastered, in all its wealth, in all its power, by conscious, persistent labor; and therefore, when all the world is awaking ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... mispronunciation or a foreign idiom. And yet he had begun to learn the language after reaching the age of manhood, and had acquired it mainly during three years of exile and teaching of Spanish in the United States. His linguistic cleverness was a fair specimen of his general ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... definition of "consciousness," "consciousness" is not the essence of life or mind. In the following lectures, accordingly, this term will disappear until we have dealt with words, when it will re-emerge as mainly a trivial and unimportant outcome of linguistic habits. ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... dialect that at least embraced many Welsh words. President Young had heard that a group of Welshmen, several hundred years before, had disappeared into the western wilds, so, with his usual quick inquiry into matters that interested him, he sent southward, led by Hamblin, in the autumn of 1858, a linguistic expedition, also including Durias Davis and Ammon M. Tenney. Davis was a Welshman, familiar with the language of his native land. Tenney, then only 15, knew a number of Indian dialects, as well as Spanish, the last learned ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... York another proof is available; for the name, different as it sounds, can be traced, by a continuous stream of linguistic development, through the Old English Eorfowic to the Roman Eboracum. In the same way the name of Dubris has unmistakably survived in Dover, Lemannae in Lympne, Regulbium in Reculver. Colonia, Glevum, Venta, Corinium, Danum, and Mancunium, ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... Zamorin, the Zammelook, the Kempsant, and the Sow Rajah, who have long disappeared. They talked of the people as Gentoos, Moors, Mallwans, Sanganians, Gennims, Warrels, Coulis, Patanners, etc., and the number of political, racial, religious, and linguistic divisions presented to their view must have been especially puzzling. Owing to the numerous languages necessary to carry on trade on the Malabar coast, they were forced to depend almost entirely on untrustworthy Portuguese ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... to bed. I slept pretty poorly. Man-eaters played a major role in my dreams. And I found it more or less appropriate that the French word for shark, requin, has its linguistic roots in the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... they would, long before, have circulated the report all over South America and the United States that there is but one toad in the Latin language. If I hadn't believed everything I see in print, hadn't been so cock-sure, and hadn't been so ready to parade borrowed plumage as my own, all this linguistic coil would have been averted. I suppose Mr. Henderson would send me to jail again for this. I certainly didn't do my best, and therefore I am immoral, and therefore ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... tribal nationalities is distributed in spots and patches, or Dalmatia, where one extremely self-conscious nation and language is present in the towns and another in the surrounding country, or Asia Minor, where no definite national boundaries, no religious, linguistic, or social homogeneities have ever established themselves since the Roman legions ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... first to note the southeastern linguistic boundary of the California Yuman groups, a boundary which lay immediately north of Bahia de Los Angeles. At the same time he placed the southernmost extent of dogs and the making or use of pottery on the peninsula in ...
— A Burial Cave in Baja California - The Palmer Collection, 1887 • William C. Massey
... compelled us to recognize, the actuality of racial differences, we have grown sceptical of the old endeavors to classify races in simple terms, as Madame de Stael attempted to do, for instance, in her famous book on Germany. We endeavor to distinguish, more accurately than of old, between ethnic, linguistic and political divisions of men. We try to look behind the name at the thing itself: we remember that "Spanish" architecture is Arabian, and a good deal of "Gothic" is Northern French. We confess that we are only at the beginning of a true science of ethnology. "It ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... cultural and linguistic differences between its Polynesian inhabitants and those of the rest of the Cook Islands, have caused it to be separately administered. The population of the island continues to drop (from a peak of 5,200 in 1966 to an estimated 1,444 ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... much of the Indian tongues," said Father Richmond. "We are all making dictionaries and grammars; we have still to translate much of our religious instruction, and the great variety in dialect of the scattered tribes keeps us busy with linguistic studies." ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... language reduced to a system of common terms that have been agreed upon in the interests of society. People have entered into a linguistic compact, an agreement that certain words and combinations of words shall be understood to mean certain things. The tradesman must understand the purchaser or there can be no exchange. The ticket-agent must understand the prospective traveler or the latter cannot ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... to look at ways of using markup to facilitate retrieval, not just for referencing or to help locate an item that is retrieved, but also to put markup tags in a text to help retrieve the thing sought either with linguistic tagging or interpretation. HOCKEY also argued that little advancement had occurred in the software tools currently available for retrieving and searching text. She pressed the desideratum of going beyond Boolean searches and performing more sophisticated searching, which ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... Burton mentions, I think, in his Life, the number of languages and dialects her husband knew. That Mahometans should seek instruction from him in the Koran, speaks of itself for his astonishing mastery of the greatest linguistic difficulties. With Indian languages and their variations, he was as completely at home as Miss Youghal's Sais; and, one may suppose, could have played the ROLE of a fakir as perfectly as he did that ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... returned Mr. Pedagog. "Listen to this embryonic Samuel Johnson the Second. What have I said that so offends the linguistic taste of ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... and yet to take no interest whatever in the history or literature of Greece and Rome; and the examination system undoubtedly tends to foster this bastard type of humanism. But when, as a result of his school and University training, a scholar has passed the linguistic portals and found pleasure in the worlds beyond, we may say of him that his education has fostered the growth of one of his expansive instincts,—perhaps the most important of all, but still only one. When Science is effectively taught, the growth of the inquisitive ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... began to turn at this time to biblical and theological studies. He was thankful in later years that he had deferred such inquiries to a time when he was capacitated for them by a calm and sound judgment, and a solid basis of linguistic and historical knowledge. He had always looked forward to holy orders, and regarding the life of a clergyman as his appointed work, he considered that an honest, a critical, and an impartial study of the Bible was his first duty. In setting about it, he came to it as a little child; all ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... with respect to our knowledge of the Egyptian language. As the Egyptians did not write down their vowels, the vocalisation of the language was hardly yet known. But results of much importance were gained—first, of a palaeographical, and, secondly, of a linguistic character. We now know exactly how they wrote in the third century B.C., and we have also learnt what was the Greek used by the respectable classes of that epoch. The Greek was far purer and better than that of the Septuagint ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... Ming Dynasty, which succeeded the Mongols in China, mention the establishment in the 11th moon of the 5th year Yong-lo (1407) of the Sse yi kwan, a linguistic office for diplomatic purposes. The languages to be studied were Niuche, Mongol, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Bokharan (Persian?) Uighur, Burmese, and Siamese. To these were added by the Manchu Dynasty two languages called Papeh and Pehyih, both dialects of the S.W. frontier. (See infra, Bk. II. ch. lvi.-lvii., ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... During the middle ages Latin was a universal language among the lettered classes, while the knowledge of Greek, though at no time so completely lost as is sometimes supposed, was a far rarer accomplishment, and was restricted for the most part to a few linguistic scholars. Thus before the revival of learning had made Greek a possible source of literary inspiration, the Vergilian tradition, through the instrumentality of Petrarch and Boccaccio, had already made itself supreme ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... pressure against them of which we have any knowledge was from the Iroquois of the north. This testimony is further strengthened by the linguistic evidence, as it has been ascertained that the language of this tribe belongs to the Iroquoian stock. Mr. Horatio Hale, a competent authority on this subject, in an article on Indian migrations published in the American Antiquarian, [Footnote: Am. Antiquarian, ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... gentlemen, however, and men of education, with considerable linguistic acquirements; for they chatted and sang, and declaimed and "did orations" all the way from Paris to Calais, in a ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... successfully pursued in many cases without a reading knowledge of the three other great mathematical languages; viz., French, German, and Italian. Hence the study of graduate mathematics necessarily presupposes some linguistic training in addition to an acquaintance with the elements ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... bonds and fetters through not understanding the German tongue. It is a weary torture to be a stupid, uncomprehended foreigner. I am lost in a linguistic swamp. It is necessary to employ one man to talk to another. The commisionnaire does not understand more than half I say. What might he not be interpreting to the other fellow? The most trivial ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... than one visit to Germany, and when he had gained a fair knowledge of the German language, he went on to the more difficult task of learning Hebrew and Arabic. This pursuit was due partly to his growing interest in Biblical study, partly to the delight he took in his own linguistic powers. He had an ear of great delicacy; he caught up sounds as by instinct; and his retentive memory fixed the impression. Later he applied the reasoning of the philologist, classified and tabulated his results, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... terribly fast," said the girl breathlessly, and Rodier came to the conclusion that Captain Bunce's opinion of his daughter's linguistic ability ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... less than 600,000 inhabitants. There are no means of overcoming the hard facts of geography, but it is essential that Roumania, while incorporating Magyar and Saxon islets in the Roumanian racial sea, should guarantee the existing institutions of the two races, and the fullest possible linguistic freedom in church,[1] school, and press. The Saxons in particular have preserved their identity for over seven centuries in this little corner of the Carpathians, and have contributed far more than their share to the cause of culture and progress in Hungary. It would be a crying irony of fate if ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... her daughter Benedetta, hoping in this way to teach the child some French; and Victorine—remaining for some five and twenty years with the same family—had by degrees raised herself to the position of housekeeper, whilst still remaining virtually illiterate, so destitute indeed of any linguistic gift that she could only jabber a little broken Italian, just sufficient for her needs in her intercourse with ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... thus rendered extremely probable that the Arawack is closely connected with the great linguistic families of South America, it becomes of prime importance to trace its extension northward, and to determine if it is in any way affined to the tongues spoken on the West India Islands, when ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... manners were so modest, so unexceptionable in every way, that no one not in the secret would or could have suspected her real business, which was to secure a succession of temporary husbands in the most respectable manner, and without leaving the hotel. Her linguistic accomplishments gave her a wide field of choice, and representatives of various nations succeeded each other at irregular but never very long intervals. As I shall be dead when this is published, perhaps it may be as well to ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... not stop to consider whether it was likely that the Indian understood the English tongue; but, as it happened, Lone Wolf could use it almost as if to the manner born; and it would have required no profound linguistic knowledge upon the part of anyone to have comprehended the meaning of the young hero. It was one of those situations in which gesture told the meaning more plainly than mere words could have done. But if ever there was an astonished aborigine, Lone ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... which is being made to the theory of translation. Sometimes the translator settled vexed questions by using marginal glosses, a method which might make for accuracy but was liable to become cumbrous and confusing. Like the prefaces, the glosses sometimes contained theological rather than linguistic comment, thus proving a special source of controversy. A proclamation of Henry the Eighth forbids the printing or importation of "any books of divine scripture in the English tongue, with any additions in the margin or any prologue ... ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... times before Herodotus, before Moses and the book of Genesis, before the Vedas in India, before the Zendavesta in Persia. It has been proved, first, that nearly all the languages of Europe belong to one linguistic family, and therefore that those who speak them were originally of one race. These different languages—seven sister languages, daughters of a language now wholly gone—are the Sanscrit or ancient Hindoo, the Zend or ancient Persian, the Greek, the Latin, the Keltic, the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... improbable that this narrative, had Maitland told it ever so movingly, would have entirely satisfied the suspicions of the Commissaire of Police. It might even have prejudiced that official against Maitland. Moreover, the Fellow of St. Gatien's had neither the presence of mind nor the linguistic resources necessary to relate the whole plot and substance of this narrative, at a moment's notice, in a cold police-office, to a sceptical alien. He therefore fell back on a demand to be allowed to communicate with the English ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... Cicero on education; the old Roman education of the body and character; causes of its breakdown; the new education under Greek influence; schools, elementary; the sententiae in use in schools; arithmetic; utilitarian character of teaching; advanced schools; teaching too entirely linguistic and literary; assumption of toga virilis; study of rhetoric and law; oratory the main object; results of this; Cicero's son at the University of Athens: his ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... said a very great Lord Mayor, "e ben traviata." His lordship's linguistic slip served him right. Latin is fair play, though some of us are in the condition of the auctioneer in The Mill on the Floss, who had brought away with him from the Great Mudport Free School "a sense of understanding ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... up by Quick as follows: "First, that the study of things should precede, or be united with, the study of words; second, that knowledge should be communicated, where possible, by appeal to the senses; third, that all linguistic study should begin with that of the mother tongue; fourth, that Latin and Greek should be taught to such boys only as would be likely to complete a learned education; fifth, that physical education should be attended ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Yankee origin, and hence old English. It may, of course, be derived according to Alice-in-Wonderland principles from "skip" and "hither" or "thither" or all three; but the claim is here made that it comes, like monkeys and men, from a common linguistic ancestor.—G.v.d.M. ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... literary matters, the first thing to be remarked upon is the linguistic miracle presented to us. It is useless to dwell upon it in detail, since this is an introduction not to Lucian, but to a translation of Lucian; it exists, none the less. A Syrian writes in Greek, and not ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... at home were supplemented by a missionary life in India so remarkable in its self-denying devotion, so characterized by distinguished ability and linguistic genius, and so notable in wisdom and persistence under the greatest difficulties that his name will ever stand preeminent in all the annals of ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... which the author of Wild Wales made to the birth-place, or the burial-place as it might be, of bard after bard, and by the short but masterly accounts which he gives of the objects of his search. Of none of the numerous subjects of his linguistic rovings does Borrow seem to have been fonder, putting Romany aside, than of Welsh. He learnt it in a peculiarly contraband manner originally, which, no doubt, endeared it to him; it was little known to and often ridiculed by most Englishmen, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... one of the fundamental doctrines of Nagualism; but this belief by no means connotes the full import of the term (as Mr. H. H. Bancroft has erroneously stated). The calendar system of Mexico and Central America, which I have shown to be substantially the same throughout many diverse linguistic stocks,[13-[]] had as one of its main objects, astrological divination. By consulting it the appropriate nagual was discovered and assigned, and this was certainly a prominent feature in the native cult and ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... and organization of a wide national territory, gradations in area mark gradations of development. And this is true, whether we consider the compass of their commercial exchanges, the scope of their maritime ventures, the extent of their linguistic area, the measure of their territorial ambitions, or the range of their intellectual interests and human sympathies. From land to ethics, the rule holds good. Peoples in the lower stages of civilization have ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... comparative grammar. literature, letters, polite literature, belles lettres[Fr], muses, humanities, literae humaniores[Lat], republic of letters, dead languages, classics; genius of language; scholarship &c. (scholar) 492. V. express by words &c. 566. Adj. lingual, linguistic; dialectic; vernacular, current; bilingual; diglot[obs3], hexaglot[obs3], polyglot; literary. Phr. "syllables govern ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... arising out of the philosophical and historical researches of his time.' They had enabled him 'to follow out all the marvellous discoveries of science, and all those hardly less marvellous, if less certain, conclusions of historical, ethnological, linguistic criticism, in the serene confidence that they are utterly irrelevant to the truth of Christianity.' 'If on such subjects,' he concluded, 'some solid ground be not found on which highly educated, reflective, reading, reasoning men may find firm footing, I can foresee nothing ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and fabulously expensive, but it had in itself besides, that which the Germans define by the word Stimmung. A number of young polyglots examined for a long time various languages of Europe to find a word which would answer best to the German Stimmung, till Maryan first, possessing the greatest linguistic capacity, came on the Polish expression nastroj (tone of mind). Yes, they agreed, universally, that the baron's dwelling produced a tone of mind; an impression not of what was in it, but of something of which it was the mysterious expression or symbol. It produced an impression ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... survivals of a prior monotheism or a primitive revelation. But if they are survivals, at all, then they are survivals from a period when the ancestors of the present-day Africans or Australian black-fellows were in an earlier stage of social development—in an earlier stage even of linguistic development and of the thought which develops with language—than their descendants are now. Even in that earlier stage of development, however, man sought for God. If he thought, mistakenly, to find Him in this or that external object, he ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... Antonio de Padua preached on the seashore it happened "that the fishes to whom he preached came out of the water and heard him with all attention." No devotee ever doubts the coming out of fishes, nor does he interests himself in the solution of the physical, physiological, linguistic, and especially logical aspects of such an event, but the Novena to the Saint ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... as a work of art, but as a medium for the display of individual linguistic dexterity; giving no thing its proper name, it delighted in paraphrase, allusion, word play, unexpected comparisons and abundance of metaphors, and revelled in the elusive, delicate, subtle, and complex. Hence ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... his comrades that he had put his meaning through to me. They clearly were impressed by his prowess. This cheered him up. He went on to further linguistic feats. ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... consider Comenius' method as applied specially to language, we recognize its general truth, and the teachers of Europe and America will now be prepared to pay it the homage of theoretical approval at least. To admire, however, his own attempt at working out his linguistic method is impossible, unless we first accept his encyclopaedism. The very faults with which he charged the school practices of the time are simply repeated by himself in a new form. The boy's mind is overloaded with a mass ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... the afternoon following Renson's linguistic troubles that "the boss" came jogging into Paraiso on his sturdy mule. In his eagerness to "clean up" the territory we fell to corraling negroes everywhere, in the streets, at work, buying their supplies ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... about fifteen that his attention began to be turned towards scientific subjects. These were at first regarded rather as a relaxation from the linguistic studies with which he had been so largely occupied. On November 22nd, 1820, he notes in his journal that he had begun Newton's "Principia": he commenced also the study of astronomy by observing eclipses, occultations, and ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... instituted Bureau of Ethnology), this distinguished investigator was able to detect only certain general similarities between the Tutelo tongue and the dialects of the Dakota tribes.(4) In 1881 Gatschet made a collection of linguistic material among the Catawba Indians of South Carolina, and was struck with the resemblance of many of the vocables to Siouan terms of like meaning, and began the preparation of a comparative Catawba-Dakota vocabulary. To this the Tutelo, cegiha, {LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED T}{LATIN SMALL ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee |
