United States or Republic of the Congo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
These words, as all that passed between them, were spoken neither in Scotch nor English, but in Gaelic which, were I able to write it down, most of my readers would no more understand than they would Phoenician: we must therefore content ourselves with what their conversation comes to in English, which, if deficient compared with Gaelic in vowel-sounds, yet serves to say most things capable of being said.
You think that because a donkey has only two vowel-sounds wherewith to express his emotions, he has no emotions to express. But let me tell you, sir ... But here we both burst out laughing 'You Golden Ass! I said,'take a munch of these roses; perhaps they will restore you. 'No, he resumed, 'I am quite serious.
Theos leaned forward breathlessly, his pulses beating with unwonted rapidity, . . what.. WHAT was it that Sah-luma sang? ... A Love-song! in those caressing vowel-sounds which composed the language of Al-Kyris, . . a love-song, burning as strong wine, tender as the murmur of the sea on mellow, moon-entranced evenings, an arrowy shaft of rhyme tipped with fire and meant to strike home to the core of feeling and there inflict delicious wounds! ... but, as each well-chosen word echoed harmoniously on his ears, Theos shrank back shuddering in every limb, . . a black, frozen numbness seemed to pervade his being, an awful, maddening terror possessed his brain and he felt as though he were suddenly thrown into a vast, dark chaos where no light should ever shine!
White's often-recurring suggestion of the Elizabethanism of our provincial dialect. Mr. White speaks of the vowels as having had their "pure sound" in the Elizabethan age. We are not sure if we understand him rightly; but have they lost it? We English have the same vowel-sounds with other nations, but indicate them by different signs.
"His wit?" no, that would be flat-footed awkwardness in the management of your vowel-sounds; the lengthened "a" was almost requisite. . . . Pope was fretting over the imbroglio when he absent-mindedly glanced up to perceive that his Sarah, not irrevocably offended, was being embraced by a certain John Hughes who was a stalwart, florid personable individual, no doubt, but, after all, only an unlettered farmer.
So they went round by the road, and coming to the hole it was a little difficult to find in the moonlight, which always disguises the most familiar things Gerald went first with the bicycle lantern which he had snatched as his pilgrims came out of the yard; the shrinking Mabel followed, and then the Ugly-Wuglies, with hollow rattlings of their wooden limbs against the stone, crept through, and with strange vowel-sounds of general amazement, manly courage, and feminine nervousness, followed the light along the passage through the fern-hung cutting and under the arch.
It does away with all danger of the "audible stroke" which occurs most frequently on the very open vowel-sounds, when the air reaches the glottis too late and is obliged to force its way through, the result being a disagreeable click; and it also obviates the defect from the opposite cause, when the air passes through the glottis too soon and results in an aspirated sound, an H before vowels, the voice, for example, emitting "Hi" for "I".
Where, in his boyhood, he had felt only the perfect, the almost austere beauty of form, the subtle interplay of vowel-sounds, the rush and fulness of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the close-packed significance of each line, the allusiveness of each word his imagination lured hither and thither on fresh trails of thought, and perpetually spurred by the sense that, beyond what he had already discovered, more marvellous regions lay waiting to be explored.
Thence came his inquiries into the roots of articulate language and the foundations of literary art; his papers on vowel-sounds, his papers in the Saturday Review upon the laws of verse, and many a strange approximation, many a just note, thrown out in talk and now forgotten.
Word Of The Day