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Updated: April 30, 2025
He plays the fiddle to the delight of all the balls and weddings through the country-side; and he speaks English to the admiration and envy of the other guides. But like all men of genius he is modest about his accomplishments. "H'I not spik good h'English h'only for camp fishin', cookin', dhe voyage h'all dhose t'ings." The aspirates puzzle him.
It may be highly satisfactory to schoolteachers to succeed in making their class read aloud passages from Shakespeare and Milton without dropping more than fifty per cent. of the aspirates, or mispronouncing more than half a dozen multi-syllabic words.
I said in England we used twenty-six letters, and I named all of them correctly except the last. I called it "zed," but the editor said it was "zee," and I did not argue the point. He then asked me to pick out the vowels, the consonants, the flats, the sharps, the aspirates, the labials, the palatals, the dentals, and the mutes.
"You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over.
She would have been proud had she known how much Mr. Lancelot was satisfied with her aspirates, which came quite natural. She had only dropped her "h's" temporarily, as one drops country friends in coming to London. Curiously enough, Mary Ann did not regard the new locutions and pronunciations as superseding the old.
I do not know that I would have exposed this impostor, even if occasion had offered, for, after all, his fraud was a tribute to our own primacy in clowning, and the Veronese were none the worse for his erring aspirates. The audience was for me the best part of the spectacle, as the audience always is in Italy, and I indulged my fancy in some cheap excursions concerning the place and people.
It is copious; every place, tree, shrub, or plant used by the people has its proper name; it is harmonious and pleasing, abounding in vowels and liquids, destitute of gutturals, and sparing in aspirates and other harsh consonants. At the same time, like the rest of the family, it is clumsy and unwieldy, whilst immense prolixity and frequent repetition must develope the finer shades of meaning.
I know that the Jews and the Arabs pronounce their aspirates in the same way, and the Spaniards do likewise with words they have taken from the Arabs who were for a long time their masters. These words are sufficiently numerous; almohada = a pillow; almohaza = a horse-comb, and other similar words, which are pronounced by holding the breath.
He himself had served as a stripling in Paoli's militia across the mountains on the great and terrible day of Ponte Nuovo, and by fits and starts, whenever the road allowed our two mules to travel abreast in safety, he told me the story of it, in a dialect of which I understood but one word in three, so different were its harsh aspirates and gutturals from any sounds in the Italian familiar to me.
In it, pure vowels predominate and consonants are in the minority, and even then many of these consonants are vocal, while the hard aspirates of other languages, especially German and English, are unknown to Italian lips. But that which is easier, by no means is always the most artistic. Ease rarely leads to depth.
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