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The improved tone is to become the student's inevitable, everyday voice. The term enunciation means the formation of words, including right vocal shape to the vowels and right form to the consonants. Pronunciation is scholastic, relating to the word accent and the vowel sound. Authority for this is in the dictionary.
It is clear that in this way the central convexity above, formed by the hard palate, forms with the corresponding concavity in the tongue a sort of trumpet-shaped organ admirably adapted for the production of the desired tone. The tongue is important in the highest degree not only in the formation of vowels, as will be shown more fully in the next chapter, but also in shaping consonants.
And if there are some few illiterate persons present, they, as consonants with vowels, in the midst of the other learned, will participate not altogether inarticulately and insignificantly.
Now, the vowel most frequently occurring in average English writing is e, and you will at once perceive that e is number five in the alphabet, counting from the beginning. More, if we go on counting so, we shall find that 20 is t, which is one of the most frequently occurring consonants.
The Hebrew word here translated "memory" consists of three consonants represented by our English zkr; it may be the word zeker, which signifies memory, or the word zakar, which signifies a male person. Jerome's conjecture in this case is sufficiently fanciful; nevertheless he illustrates the impossibility of determining the exact meaning of many Hebrew sentences.
When the time came that vowels were to be added to the consonants, the vowels of this other word Lord were placed under the consonants of the sacred name, so that in the word Jehovah, where the J H V H occur, there are the consonants of one word whose vowels are unknown and the vowels of another word whose consonants are not used.
And then was it like this? they grew material, and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit; and their tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis with its complex civilization its infinitely more complex civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing human brain; and a thousand languages were formed many of them to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America as much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese: highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up and filigreed beyond telling; and that was at the midmost point and highest material civilization of Atlantis.
A minute investigation of the speech of each individual would reveal countless differences of detail in choice of words, in sentence structure, in the relative frequency with which particular forms or combinations of words are used, in the pronunciation of particular vowels and consonants and of combinations of vowels and consonants, in all those features, such as speed, stress, and tone, that give life to spoken language.
If you put together a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they will attract special attention to the words in which they occur, and the significance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified; but whether the words are 'a team of little atomies' or 'a triumphant terrible Titan, it is not the sound of the consonants that makes the significance.
A thing most precious and dainty, of great use and antiquity. Debts, I say, surmounting the number of syllables which may result from the combinations of all the consonants, with each of the vowels heretofore projected, reckoned, and calculated by the noble Xenocrates.
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