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Updated: May 14, 2025
'A-n-d' spells 'and. You pronounce it 'an'. 'I-n-g' spells 'ing. Sometimes you pronounce it 'ing' and sometimes you leave off the 'g. And then you slur by dropping initial letters and diphthongs. 'T-h-e-m' spells 'them. You pronounce it oh, well, it is not necessary to go over all of them. What you need is the grammar. I'll get one and show you how to begin."
Here let it be noted that the age of a MS. can easily be discovered; and that, too, in a variety of ways: by the formation of the characters, such as the roundness of the letters; or their largeness or smallness; the writing of the final l's; the use of the Gothic s's and the Gothic j's; the dotting, or no dotting of the i's; the absence or presence of diphthongs; the length of the lines; the punctuation; the accentuation; the form or size; the parchment or the paper; the ink; or some other mode of detection.
To their ears, however, it would seem, each consonant appeared to carry with it a short a, and as this, occurring before i and u, produced the diphthongs ai and au, sounded nearly as e and o, it seemed necessary, where a consonant was to be directly followed by the sounds i or u, to have special forms to which the sound of a should not attach.
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.
The Tahaitian dialect is distinguished by its melody, as it has no broad or hissing consonants. The pronunciation is rendered difficult by its numerous diphthongs. The substantives do not change their terminations in declension; but the cases, of which there are but three, are formed by syllables prefixed: for example Nom. Te taata the man. Poss. No te taata of the man. Object.
Among the vowel sounds the diphthongs in Latin, and in the northern dialects generally, appear very much destroyed, whereas in the southern Italian dialects they have suffered little; and connected with this is the fact, that in composition the Roman weakens the radical vowel otherwise so strictly preserved, a modification which does not take place in the kindred group of languages.
The style is elevated, and the versification in general harmonious. By the mixture of obsolete words, it possesses an air of solemnity well adapted to abstruse researches; at the same time that by the frequent resolution of diphthongs, it instils into the Latin the sonorous and melodious powers of the Greek language.
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