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Madame illustrated again, first humming on one tone, then letting it out with full resonance, using the vowel Ah, which melted into O, and later changed into U, as the tone died away. "This vibration in the voice should not be confounded with a tremolo, which is, of course, very undesirable. A voice without vibrato, would be cold and dead, expressionless.
The Phoenician letters are, all of them, consonants; and the reader is expected to supply the vowel sounds for himself. There was not even any system of pointing, so far as we know, whereby, as in Hebrew and Arabic, the proper sounds were supplied.
A flesh-lined cavity is capable of reinforcing tones covering a range of several notes. Further, the vowel sound, and presumably also the tone quality, are determined more by the action of the vocal cords than by the adjustment of the resonance cavities. "The glottal lips vibrate differently for the different vowels."
The Assyrian characters do, in fact, correspond, not to letters, according to our notion of letters, but to syllables. These syllables are either mere vowel sounds, such as we represent by our vowels and diphthongs, or such sounds accompanied by one or two consonants. The vowels are not very numerous. The Assyrians recognize three only as fundamental a, i, and u.
"Vocal Mastery is acquired through correct understanding of what constitutes pure vowel sounds, and such control of the breath as will enable one to convert every atom of breath into singing tone. This establishes correct action of the vocal chords and puts the singer in possession of the various tints of the voice.
In this they are encouraged by the teachers, who habitually neglect the less sonorous vowels and make their pupils sing all their exercises on the easy vowel A. No wonder, then, that the tones of an Italian singer commonly sound sweet: he makes them up of nothing but pure sugar.
The differences in their characters are produced by changes in the position of the tongue, mouth, and lips. Consonants are sounds produced by interruptions of the outgoing current of air, but in some cases have no sound in themselves, and serve merely to modify vowel sounds.
The ancient and universal restraints were swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were 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.
For a weaker aspirate, as for example in this word haín, where the h has less force, I avail myself of this lion's head or of these three lotus flowers, according to the quantity of the vowel. Besides, I have the nasal sound which does not exist in the Latin-Spanish alphabet.
The glorious Sussex accent, whose only vowel is the broad "a", grows but more rich and emphatic from the necessity of impressing itself upon foreign intruders. Upon my soul, when I climb up the Beacon to read my book on the warm turf, the sight of an engine coming through the cutting is an emphasis of my selfish enjoyment.
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