"Vowel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her mouth, as one opens it to pronounce the vowel a, and motioned to the child to open her mouth in the same manner. Then the mistress made her a sign to emit her voice. She did so; but instead of a, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... vowel A is formed by opening the mouth widely: A. Its vowels are to be given the sounds ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... how the crest is always some tremendous thing in vision, or thought as well as sound. So he has everlasting variation; manages his storms and billows; and so I think his music is greater in effect than Homer's—would still be greater, could we be sure of Homer's tones and vowel- values; as I think his vision goes deeper into the realm of the Soul ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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
... not 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
... 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
... 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 to have been lost even at an early period of Sanskrit literature; for another is met with ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • 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)
... Esperanto, concluding with a question of general interest regarding the sound of "Scii." This word, represented phonetically, does present some difficulty. S-ts-ee-ee is not easy to pronounce. In practice one should elide the first "s" on to the vowel immediately preceding. Thus mi scias is pronounced ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 3 • Various
... than that of the Porto Rican "jibaro" and is more easily understood by the outsider. Slight differences of pronunciation are noticeable in different parts of the country: the people of Seibo are inclined to use the vowel "i" instead of the consonant "r" and say "poique" instead of "porque," somewhat as the New York street urchin says "boid" for "bird"; the people of Santiago sometimes drop the "r" entirely and say "poque," as the Southern negro in the United States says ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... strengthening of the voice, should also be adapted to develop and perfect the process of breathing. The student should be frequently trained in set exercises in loud exclamations, pronouncing with great force the separate vowel sounds, single words, and whole sentences, and at the same time taking care to bring into vigorous action, all the muscular apparatus of respiration. Shouting, calling, and loud vociferation, in the open air, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds. ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... ear ... My best guide. Observe the juxtaposition of mine and my in these lines. Mine is frequent before a vowel, especially when the possessive adjective is not emphatic. In Shakespeare 'mine' is almost always found before "eye," "ear," etc., where no emphasis is intended ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... the Dak dak (Arabic letters) and the Dakak-dakak (Arabic letters) of the workmen. In these two onomapoetics we trace the expression which characterises the Arab tongue: all syllables are composed of consonant and vowel, the latter long or short as B and B ; or of a vowelled consonant followed by a consonant ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... tongues Influence upon Christendom of the Hebrew legends Lucretius's theory of the origin of language The teachings of the Church fathers on this subject The controversy as to the divine origin of the Hebrew vowel points Attitude of the reformers toward this question Of Catholic scholars.—Marini Capellus and his adversaries ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... I do not remember having heard mention of as remarkable, has nearly every consonantal and vowel sound in the language. Try it by the Greek and by the English alphabet; it is a curiosity. Tell me that old Homer did not roll his sightless eyeballs about with delight, as he thundered out these ringing syllables! It seems hard to think of his ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... throughout The Country Squire that every pair of lines taken alternately ends in rhymes which are perfect or nearly so. Now a perfect rhyme is one in which the two rhyming syllables are both accented, the vowel sound and the consonants which follow the vowels are identical, and the sounds preceding the vowel are different. For instance, the words smile and style rhyme. Both of these are monosyllables and hence accented. The vowel sound is the long sound of i; the consonant ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... but usually the metrical accent of any given word corresponds to its logical accent. The accentuation of a syllable tends to lengthen the time used in the pronunciation of that syllable, and so we call it long, although the sound of its vowel may be short. Short syllables are those which are unaccented, even though the vowel ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... this, Milton's poetical taste in general seems to have been 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... 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 and dignity can only be reached by the soldier, and never by the artisan; ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of which there are twenty six in our language, are divided into vowels and consonants. There are five proper vowels, a, e, i, o, and u. Y is generally a consonant at the beginning of words, and a vowel at the end of them. ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... means of ropes leading to the points of the leading sled. At the rear the "pusher off" half reclined, graceful and nonchalant. With the exception of the steersman, who was too busy, each had his mouth wide open and was expirating in one long-drawn continuous vowel-sound. This vowel-sound was originally the first part of the word "out." It had long since become conventionalized, but still served its purpose as ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... other facts, according to endless diversities of permutation and combination, furnish grounds for such eternal successions of new speculations as make the facts themselves virtually new. The same Hebrew words are read by different sets of vowel points, and the same hieroglyphics are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... the native idea, consists of only twenty consonants. But as a matter of fact, each of these consonants is credited with an inherent vowel sound of a (often written o) as in water; and there are five vowel signs which are attached to the consonants, and so vary the inherent a. There are also twenty auxiliary consonant forms, corresponding to the original twenty consonants, which are used in ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... had rejected the infallible inspiration of the Church, and, in consequence, had thrown a greater burden on the Scriptures. The Scriptures became the Word of God, verbally and literally true; in its extreme form this doctrine reverted almost to the ancient Rabbinical maxim that even the vowel points and accents were of divine origin. In practice, if not in theory, the halo was extended to cover even the marginal chronology, then a familiar feature in the editions of the English Bible. The present ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Tilly Slowboy's constant astonishment at finding herself so kindly treated and installed in such a comfortable home. For the maternal and paternal Slowboy were alike unknown to Fame, and Tilly had been bred by public charity, a foundling; which word, though only differing from fondling by one vowel's length, is very different in meaning, and expresses ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... appear as "the most primitive" of French epics of the 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 ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Except in a few familiar words, such as Nerbudda and Hindoo, which are spelled in the traditional manner, vowels are to be pronounced as in Italian, or as in the following English examples, namely: a, as in 'call'; e, or e, as the medial vowel in 'cake'; i, as in 'kill'; i, as the medial vowels in 'keel'; u, as in 'full'; u, as the medial vowels in 'fool'; o, or o, as in 'bone'; ai, or ai, as 'eye' or 'aye', respectively; and au, as the medial sound in 'fowl'. Short a, with stress, is pronounced ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... 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 ...
— 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
... 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 ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... difficult 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 hopefully. The amiable ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... write the proper accent over a letter just as infallibly as he writes the proper letters in a word. But, strange to say, it is very common, even with good French scholars (in the book-sense or literary sense of scholarship) to find them putting the acute accent for the grave over a vowel, or the grave instead of the acute, or omitting the circumflex accent entirely, and ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... 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:], and [o:]. ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... if he had been wielding sword and buckler in an opera, and his narrow chest swelled under the tight buttons of his ragged old frock-coat. Every English word he spoke was supplemented by an Italian vowel, so that his language, though it was perfectly fluent and correct, sounded quite foreign. His extraordinary height and leanness made him grotesque to look at, but neither the comicality of his figure nor his theatrical voice and gesture could kill the ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... have received its present form in Picardy. It is written, as you see, in alternate snatches of verse and prose. The verse, which was chanted, is not rhymed as a rule, but each laisse, or screed, as in the "Chanson de Roland," runs on the same final assonance, or vowel ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... on this instrument every sound struck on the keys represents a certain vowel-consonant sound. Thus the listener hears the sounds more distinctly than we hear the words of ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... place and personal names were printed with a macron over a vowel or vowels. These are shown in this text as follows. For example [a] means a macron appeared over the letter "a" in the text, as in K[a]-ye-fah. S[aa]-hanh-que-ah indicates a single macron appeared over two consecutive "a" characters in ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... formerly used before words beginning with h, even when that letter was sounded, and also before words beginning with a vowel. ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... given you cause to think I deserve to have such a punishment hung in terrorem over me? Besides, threatening me is injudicious, for it rouses a spirit of resistance in me not easy to break down. I assure you o [in allusion to my mispronunciation of that vowel] is really greatly improved. I take much pains with it, as also with my deportment; they will, I hope, no longer annoy you when next we meet. You must not call Mrs. J—— my friend, for I do not. I like her much, and I see a great ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... consonants as the backbone of the language, and hence, as the essential feature in a rhyme; and never allows the repetition of a consonant in a rhyme to be modified by a change in the preceding vowel, or by the recurrence of the rhyming syllable in a different word—or the repetition of a consonant in blank verse to create a half-consonance resembling a rhyme: though other poets do not shrink from ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... distinct sounds, or words, are usually complex in nature, being made up of two or more elementary sounds. These are classed either as vowels or consonants and are represented by the different letters of the alphabet. The vowel sounds are made with the mouth open and are more nearly the pure vibrations of the vocal cords. The consonants are modifications of the vocal cord vibrations produced by the tongue, teeth, lips, ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... 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. Not only the siege orphans, but ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... worthy man is quite mistaken, and I only ask you to listen to what I have to say on the subject. Your masculine verse has only twelve poetic syllables, and the feminine thirteen. All Martelli's lines have fourteen syllables, except those that finish with a long vowel, which at the end of a line always counts as two syllables. You will observe that the first hemistitch in Martelli always consists of seven syllables, while in French it only has six. Your friend Pierre Jacques was either stone deaf or ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the rime, it will be observed that the vowel terminals of the octave and the sestet are differentiated. Anything approaching assonance between the two divisions is to be counted ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Lanier uses almost all the types of verse — iambic, trochaic, blank, the sonnet, etc. — and with about equal skill. Three features, however, specially characterize his verse: the careful distribution of vowel-colors and the frequent use of alliteration and of phonetic syzygy,*1* by which last is meant a combination or succession of identical or similar consonants, whether initially, medially, or finally, as for instance the succession of M's in Tennyson's "The moan of doves in immemorial elms ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... details for future reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter. If you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friend at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A, for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R, thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis, you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward, that the R had been put in, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... library which he had already so well used. Aristophanes followed Zenodotus in his critical efforts to mend the text of Homer's poems. He also invented the several marks by which grammarians now distinguish the length and tone of a syllable and the breathing of a vowel, that is, the marks for long and short, and the accents and aspirate. The last two, after his time, were always placed over Greek words, and are still used in ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... alphabetized as "ae". The letter I is alphabetized according to its phonetic value, vowel before consonant. J is not used. Thorn / and eth (capital does not occur) are alphabetized as "th". The letters U and V are shown with the form used in their source documents, but are alphabetized ...
— A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - From A.D. 1150 To 1580 • A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat
... distract the attention and diminish the strength of the impression produced, then do surplus articulations do so. A certain effort, though commonly an inappreciable one, must be required to recognize every vowel and consonant. If, as all know, it is tiresome to listen to an indistinct speaker, or read a badly-written manuscript; and if, as we cannot doubt, the fatigue is a cumulative result of the attention needed to catch successive ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... his complicated rhymed stanza from the limited resources of his native language. This stanza, with alternate and repeatedly recurring rhymes, is borrowed from the Italians. It is peculiarly fitted to their language, which abounds in similar vowel terminations, and is as little adapted to ours, from the stubborn, unaccommodating resistance which the consonant endings of the northern languages make to this sort of endless sing-song.—Not that I would, on that account, part with the stanza ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... A vowel is a letter that can be perfectly sounded by itself. The vowels are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes w and y. W and y are consonants when they begin a word or syllable; but in every other situation ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... Rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, vowel coloring, the effect of enjambement, to name only the more obvious phenomena, appeal solely to the ear. Looking at a page of verse is like looking at a page of music. Unless the symbols are translated into sound values, the effect is blank. A skilled ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... breve [C/] C with stroke [e] e with macron [n] superscript n, used to represent nasalization of the preceding vowel [o] ...
— Catalogue Of Linguistic Manuscripts In The Library Of The Bureau Of Ethnology. (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (Pages 553-578)) • James Constantine Pilling
... the asperity and discordance of our speech, and in general, this reproach is just, for there are many persons who do scanty justice to the vowel-elements of our language. Although these elements constitute its music they are continually mistreated. We flirt with and pirouette around them constantly. If it were not so, English would be found full of beauty and harmony of sound. Familiar ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... from Duncan, into the midst of which rushed another from Mrs Catanach, similar, but coarse in vowel and ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... 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
... pantheistically, and he is the first and best of all things. In the tenth chapter he names with great particularity sixty-six classes of things in which he is always the first: the first of elephants, horses, trees, kings, heroes, etc. "Among letters I am the vowel A." "Among seasons I am spring." "Of the deceitful I ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... to observe that there is not, to the best of my remembrance, one vowel gaping on another for want of a caesura in this whole poem. But where a vowel ends a word the next begins either with a consonant or what is its equivalent; for our w and h aspirate, and our diphthongs, are plainly such. The greatest ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... or we, and moreover he places them in his alphabet on the same page. If this proposal was originally his own, it is curious that the name ve should have been adopted, though not the we for w. Ben Jonson points out the double power of i and v as both consonant and vowel, but he does not attempt to make them into separate ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... Although there were three characters to represent the vowels when used alone, whenever a consonant would be pronounced with "a," only the sign of the consonant was used. In order to express a final consonant, or one without the vowel, a tiny cross was made below the character. If "e" was wanted, a dot would be placed over the letter that expressed the consonant, or if the vowel was to be "u," ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... [] followed by a vowel represents a macron. The symbol [)] followed by a vowel represents ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... [-e] [-i] ... [vowel with macron or "long" mark] [)a] [)e] [)i] ... [vowel with breve or "short" mark] [The book generally used circumflex accents to represent long vowels. Anomalies ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... record with any certainty, or indeed, in any way. Absolute ignorance of that language, except the brief mention in my father's communications, received by myself from that body—whose publication before I die is the sole purpose of this manuscript—make it quite certain that it is in the main a vowel language, consisting of short vocalic syllables. In such a case it is probable that some abbreviation has been used, and the problem of its resolution simply is placed out of the question. I may here partially forestall the ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... having their names called aloud, as their carriages arrived, by an official, who knew the names and addresses of us all. We also knew his mode of adapting the names of foreigners to his Italian organs. "Hasa" (Florentine for casa) "Tro-lo-pe," with a long-drawn-out accent on the last vowel, was the absolutely fatal signal for the sudden breaking up of many a ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... other languages as well as the Castilian. Sometimes they were broken into stanzas of four lines each, thence called redondillas, or roundelays, but their prominent peculiarity is that of the asonante, an imperfect rhyme that echoes the same vowel, but not the same final consonant in the terminating syllables. This metrical form was at a later period adopted by the dramatists, and is now used in every department of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... division of the poem into stanzas was of course a corollary, the 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
... appropriately, some object for which they have no positive name. Engro properly means a fellow, and engri, which is the feminine or neuter modification, a thing. When the noun or verb terminates in a vowel, engro is turned into mengro, and engri into mengri. I have already shown how, by affixing engro to kaun, the Gypsies have invented a word to express a hare. In like manner, by affixing engro to pov, earth, ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... is 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
... several results desirable to be attained in a series of school reading-books. These include good pictorial illustrations, a combination of the word and phonic methods, careful grading, drill on the peculiar combinations of letters that represent vowel-sounds, correct spelling, exercises well arranged for the pupil's preparation by himself (so that he shall learn the great lessons of self-help, self-dependence, the habit of application), exercises ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... which, in its turn, may be the plural of how, a hill (Chapter XII), or the genitive of How, one of the numerous medieval forms of Hugh (Chapter VI). Hind may be for Hine, a farm servant (Chapter III), or for Mid. Eng. hende, courteous (cf. for the vowel change Ind, Chapter XIII), and is perhaps sometimes also an animal nickname (Beasts, Chapter XXIII). Rouse is generally Fr. roux, i.e. the red, but it may also be the nominative form of Rou, i.e. of Rolf, or Rollo, the sea-king who conquered ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... no doubt that Mr Brass intended some compliment or other; and it has been argued with show of reason that he would have said Buffon, but made use of a superfluous vowel. Be this as it may, Quilp gave him no time for correction, as he performed that office himself by more than tapping him on the head with ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... 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, "to throw," because when a stone is thrown ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... disemboweled them and warped them all out of shape. Have you ever heard a real ingrowing Englishman start a word in the roof of his mouth and then back away from it as if it was red-hot and had prickles on it? It's interesting. They seem to think it is indecent to come brazenly out and sound a vowel. ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... No vowel must ever be prolonged unnaturally, no word of mine must ever change into a mere musical note, no singer of my words must ever cease to be a ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... hyphen after prefixes ending in a vowel (except bi and tri) when using them before a vowel: co-exist. When using such a prefix before a consonant do not use the hyphen except to distinguish the word from a word of the same letters but of different meaning: correspondent, but co-respondent (one called to answer a summons); recreation, ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... of his life, and the results fill five large volumes. The sounds which are most difficult to define exactly are the vowels; a great variety may be indicated by the same symbol. In the New English Dictionary no fewer than thirteen different nuances of vowel sound are distinguished under the symbol A alone. In English, moreover, the vowel sounds tend to become diphthongs, so that the symbol for the simple sound tends to become the symbol for that combination which we call a diphthong. Thus the long ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... are now generally adopted, there are a few cases where printers and proof-readers disagree. In the division of a word at the end of a line, the English prefer to divide on the vowel, as in ha-bit, pre-face, pro-phet; the American, on the consonant, as hab-it, pref-ace, proph-et. The former division shows the origin of the word; the latter, its pronunciation. Of the two, I prefer the English style; for instance, in ...
— The Importance of the Proof-reader - A Paper read before the Club of Odd Volumes, in Boston, by John Wilson • John Wilson
... curious example of deformation. Originally feminine nouns beginning with a vowel took the feminine ma before them, the vowel of ma being elided. Thus, m'amie; but later the word was ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... out her own peculiar, strange processes. Thus, for example, she—like many children, however,—learned writing before reading. Not she herself, meek and yielding by nature, but some peculiar quality of her mind, obstinately refused in reading to harness a vowel alongside of a consonant, or vice versa; in writing, however, she would manage this. For penmanship along slanted rulings she, despite the general wont of beginners, felt a great inclination; she wrote bending low over the paper; blew ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... 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)
... seating herself and letting her fingers run over the keys, "can't you substitute another word for 'muffled' in the third line? It comes on a high note—upper g—and I want a long, not a short vowel sound." ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was his desire to be a 'correct' writer, a careful observer of proportion and construction, a producer of artful felicities in metre, rhythm, rhyme, phrase. We may yield to no one in the delight of tracing the exact correspondence of strophe and antistrophe in a Greek chorus, the subtle vowel-music of a Latin hymn or a passage of Rossetti's. But I cannot see why, because we rejoice in these things, we should demand them of all poetry, or why, because we rejoice in the faultless construction of Fielding or the exquisite finish of Jane Austen ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... is used before consonantal sounds and an which is used before vowel sounds are called indefinite articles because they individualize without specializing. The is called the definite article because ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... speech used universally. The language was shorn of a number of grammatical peculiarities, the distinctive forms for the subjunctive mood for example and most of its irregular plurals were abolished; its spelling was systematised and adapted to the vowel sounds in use upon the continent of Europe, and a process of incorporating foreign nouns and verbs commenced that speedily reached enormous proportions. Within ten years from the establishment of the World Republic the New English Dictionary had swelled to ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... of tradition went another task, that of fixing the letters of the consonantal text of the Bible (by the Massora), its vowel pronunciation (by the punctuation), and its translation into the Aramaic vernacular (Targum). Here also the Babylonians came after the Palestinians, yet of this sort of erudition Palestine continued to be the headquarters even after ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... your own satisfaction a method for assigning sound values; how will you reach the differences in vowel sounds that prevail in the United States? The New Englander's mouthing of a differs from that of the Northern New Yorker, and both differ greatly from that of the Southerner—indeed, in the different Southern States there is variation.... At first I was interested in simplified spelling, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... 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 book, "I transcribe the syllable ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... 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 Prince,' 'The Physician of His Own Honor,' ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... catch the just pronunciation of a word. For my own part, no language seemed easier to acquire than this; every harsh and sibilant consonant being banished from it, and almost every word ending in a vowel. The only requisite, was a nice ear to distinguish the numerous modifications of the vowels which must naturally occur in a language confined to few consonants, and which, once rightly understood, give ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... vowel sounds we use in speech; They're A, and E, I, O, and U: I mean to cut them down to four. You "wonder what good that will do." Why, this cold earth will bloom again, Eden itself be half re-won, When breaks the dawn of my success And U and I at last ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... according to the prevailing mood. Moreover, by uttering the various vowels of his language, man is able to impart varying colour to the sounds of his speech. For the difference we experience when a tone is sung on the vowel 'a' or the vowel 'e', etc., derives from the particular colour given by the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... meaning cannot be arrived at by a study of the language, nor from the authority of Scripture. (58) I will not go to such lengths as to say that the Bible, in so far as it contains the Divine law, has always preserved the same vowel-points, the same letters, or the same words (I leave this to be proved by, the Massoretes and other worshippers of the letter), I only, maintain that the meaning by, which alone an utterance is entitled to be called Divine, has come down to us ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... wealthy family "De Metis". Though the "i" is long in the original, and Simrock uses the form "Ortewein" in his translation, the spelling with short "i" has been chosen, as the lack of accent tends to shorten the vowel in such names. (14) "Gere" is likewise a late introduction. He is perhaps the historical Margrave Gere (965) of East Saxony, whom Otto the Great appointed as a leader against the Slavs. See O. von Heinemann, "Markgraf Gero", Braunschweig, 1860, and Piper, L 43. (15) ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... observe, that after several sheets of that Gospel had been printed, after the same manner as that adopted in the first edition, Mr. Lipoftsoff, the Censor, gave me notice that he had determined that the position of the vowel-points should be altered; and I did not think proper to make any opposition. But as common-sense informed me that it was by no means expedient to exhibit two systems of pointing in the same work, I subsequently ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... diphthongs.[17] They have neither the oe nor ue, which the Germans consider as the best sounds of their idiom: nor the Greek,[Greek: ei], [Greek: ui], [Greek: au], [Greek: eu], and the like; still less the variety of pronunciation of one and the same vowel, peculiar to the English. The Poles, Russians, and Bohemians, possess however a twofold i, [18] a finer and a coarser one; the latter of which is not to be found in any other European language, and is unpleasant to the ear of foreigners. The ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... French, who are equally chargeable with the English with barbarism in this particular, dispose of their le and their la without ceremony, and always take care that they shall be absorbed, both in verse and in prose, in the vowel that immediately follows them. Fourthly, and I believe lastly, the practice of cutting short "the" is warranted by Milton, who of all English poets that ever lived, had certainly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Were these allowed to have any weight, the Chinese spoken language is of such a nature, that it would be no difficult task to point out its relationship to that of every nation upon earth. Being entirely monosyllabic, and each word ending in a vowel or a liquid, and being, at the same time, deprived of the sounds of several letters in our alphabet, it becomes necessarily incapable of supplying any great number of distinct syllables. Three hundred are, in fact, nearly ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... by the Right Rev. John Payne, D.D. 150, Nassau Street, New York, 1864), distinguish between similar words, especially monosyllables, by a certain pitch of voice, the Mpongwe repel accent, and rely solely upon the clear and distinct vowel sounds." But I found the negative past, present, and future forms of verbs wholly dependent upon a change of accent, or rather of intonation or voice-pitch, which the stranger's ear, unless acute, will fail to detect. For instance, Mi Taund would mean "I love;" ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... are a sort of bond which pervades all the other letters, so that without a vowel one consonant cannot be ...
— Sophist • Plato
... unparalleled exactness and subtlety, but also with unequalled variety of sound. Further it is probable that English surpasses the other three great languages of song, German, Italian, and French, in number of distinguishable vowel sounds, but in questions of ear authorities usually differ, and it is hazardous to claim in this an indubitable supremacy. It seems certain, however, that English has rather more than twice as many vowel sounds as Italian (the poorest language in this respect), which has only seven or eight. ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... which has two preterite-forms, both employed by Shelley (See for an example of the longer form, the "Hymn to Mercury", 18 5, where 'leaped' rhymes with 'heaped' (line 1). The shorter form, rhyming to 'wept,' 'adapt,' etc., occurs more frequently.)—one with the long vowel of the present-form, the other with a vowel-change (Of course, wherever this vowel-shortening takes place, whether indicated by a corresponding change in the spelling or not, "t", not "ed" is properly used—'cleave,' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... sometimes singed from the fire of the diminishing butt. For orderly, he had a black fat Congo boy, in dark blue Belgian uniform, flat-nosed, with wrinkles down the forehead. He was Gilson's man, never looking at him in speaking, and using an open vowel dialect. Before one of the attacks, a soldier came to Gilson with his wife's picture, watch, ring, and money, and ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... from 'copies' and are therefore full of errors, which are due for the most part, doubtless, to the copyist and not to the sculptor. It is not difficult, however, in most cases under consideration here, to restore the correct reading. Usually only vowel signs are omitted or misread and, here, and there, consonants closely resembling one another as va and cha, va, and dha, ga and ['s]a, ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... 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
... JACK: The letter E is the one to be added to that church-wall text which you gave to your chicks in May. If this vowel is set in at the right places, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... might, indeed, have been far apter in Spanish 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 ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... volume of passion or of thought. The musical character (less inarticulate and more regular), which has also been noted in the poems of the trouveres, is here eminent: though the woodnote wild of the Minnesinger is quite absent or very rarely present. The facility of double rhymes, with a full vowel sound in each syllable, has a singular and very pleasing effect, as in the piece by ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... they should be as simple 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 ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... is usually formed by adding the syllable "wog" to the singular; if the word ends in a vowel, only the letter "g" is added; and sometimes the syllables "yog," ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow. Then gave me recipe for what he calls RISOTTO ALLA BERGAMASCA. When he pronounces a soft O he protrudes his full carnal lips as if he kissed the vowel. Has he? And could he repent? Yes, he could: and cry two round rogue's tears, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... twelve, waving his hand towards us in a way which seemed to say to them, "Gentlemen, behold the enigma!" Then, beginning with the eldest, the twelve jabbered at us in turn, apparently in different tongues, some sibilant, some guttural, and others with the musical cadence of frequent vowel sounds. Needless to say, each was equally incomprehensible to us, and we did not think it worth while to try German or English upon them. When they had finished, they looked much vexed, and slowly wagged their beards. Then the youth spoke ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... real nature of the syllabary. Let us take for consideration the consonantal sound represented by the letter b. A moment's consideration will make it clear that this sound enters into a large number of syllables. There are, for example, at least twenty vowel sounds in the English language, not to speak of certain digraphs; that is to say, each of the important vowels has from two to six sounds. Each of these vowel sounds may enter into combination with the b sound alone to form three syllables; as ba, ab, bal, be, eb, bel, etc. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... in, dressed and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon visions ranging between the extremes of man's experience. Spelled with an "e" it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams; with an "a" it drapes lamentation ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... 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 ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... to peace? Not we, was our firm declaration; we were most pacifically inclined, and ever had been; we were, in fact, little saints. But the enemy could not be brought to any terms of accommodation. "That we will try," said the vowel amongst our guardians, Mr. E. He, being a magistrate, had naturally some weight with the proprietors of the cotton factory. The foremen of the several floors were summoned, and gave it as their humble opinion that we, the aristocratic party in the war, were as bad as the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... whatever language, are likely to be in poetical form. The commonest type is in two well-balanced, rhyming lines. Filipino versification is less exacting in its demand in rhyme than our own; it is sufficient if the final syllables contain the same vowel; thus Rizal says—ayup and pagud, aval and alam, rhyme. The commonest riddle verse contains five or seven, ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... out the ten letters which are to be used in the telegram, it is well to avoid the unusual consonants and to have a vowel ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme in these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fills nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds, in which, as if to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as men's ears differ, he tells us that the short a sound is the same in man and Darby, the short o sound in God and does, and what he calls the long o sound ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... tone placement, et cetera, from the ground up. Hence the absolute necessity of the choirmaster being a voice specialist. He need not have a fine solo voice, but he must know the essentials of good singing, and must be able to demonstrate with his own voice what he means by purity of vowel, clearness of enunciation, et cetera. These things are probably always best taught by imitation, even in the case of adults; but when dealing with a crowd of lively American boys, imitation is practically the only method that can be used successfully. We shall not attempt to give information ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... Touch-and-go Bullet-head, of Frogpondium, would let Mr. John Smith perceive that he, Bullet-head, could indite, if it so pleased him, a whole paragraph—aye! a whole article—in which that contemptible vowel should not once—not even once—make its appearance. But no;—that would be yielding a point to the said John Smith. He, Bullet-head, would make no alteration in his style, to suit the caprices of any Mr. Smith in Christendom. Perish so vile a thought! The O forever; He would persist in the O. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... continue, but I do not know that he has any 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 neglected for a young one. Adieu! my dear sweet Fanny, this is ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... denoting names. If not a simple ideogram, this prefix is most probably used in some sense phonetically with reference chiefly to the k sound. The circle of dots is used here probably to indicate the vowel sound u or o. But in making this suggestion I do not by any means intend to suggest that the Maya scribes had reached that stage of advancement where they could indicate each sound by a character. ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas |
