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Let the minister stand up for even five minutes each day, with chest and abdomen well expanded, and pronounce aloud the long vowel sounds of the English language, in various shades of force and feeling, and shortly he will observe his voice developing in flexibility, resonance, and power. For it should be remembered that the voice grows through use.
A Syllable is a non-significant sound, composed of a mute and a vowel: for GR without A is a syllable, as also with A, GRA. But the investigation of these differences belongs also to metrical science. A Connecting word is a non-significant sound, which neither causes nor hinders the union of many sounds into one significant sound; it may be placed at either end or in the middle of a sentence.
No grammarian has ever given any explanation about them. All mere matters of memory. The very alphabet shows the richness of the language. There are twenty-nine letters, besides vowel points; and each letter is written in four different ways, so that it is different when isolated, when in the beginning, middle, or end of a word. It took me some hours to learn them.
The Basque, indeed, may be said to be almost a vowel language; the number of consonants employed being comparatively few: perhaps eight words out of ten commence and terminate with a vowel, owing to which it is a language to the highest degree soft and melodious, far excelling in this respect any other language in Europe, not even excepting the Italian.
Neither vowels nor consonants are absolutely pure that is, entirely free from foreign elements, from noise; but for all practical purposes a vowel is a pure sound, a consonant a sound accompanied inevitably by much noise.
In these three respects therefore, as the conquerors in all the five exercises, it claims the precedence, that of most other letters by being a vowel, that of other vowels by being dichronous, and lastly, that of these double-timed vowels themselves because it is its nature to go before and never after them.
Italian is generally considered an easier language to pronounce in song, as indeed it is, all the vowel sounds being full and sonorous and lacking that "covered" or mixed quality so often occurring in the French.
The mechanism of speech might be discussed at any length, but to reduce it to its simplest form it consists of the sound producing instrument, the vocal cords, the organs of enunciation lips, tongue, teeth and soft palate, and the channel leading to the outer air. When the vocal cords are producing pitch and the channel is free the result is a vowel.
In the Athabaskan group many verbs change the quality or quantity of the vowel of the radical element as it changes its tense or mode. In another Indian language, Yokuts , vocalic modifications affect both noun and verb forms. Consonantal change as a functional process is probably far less common than vocalic modifications, but it is not exactly rare.
We may, therefore, pass this over as an inquiry that belongs to another art, not to poetry. A Letter is an indivisible sound, yet not every such sound, but only one which can form part of a group of sounds. For even brutes utter indivisible sounds, none of which I call a letter. The sound I mean may be either a vowel, a semi-vowel, or a mute.
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