Word: ch
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...singing, gymnastics and dancing. Fearsome, comic masks and face-painting, costumes, and a whole intricate play of gesture have complex, traditional significances (stooping, for instance, means passing under a lintel, i. e., entering another house). The singing is accompanied by one musician producing whining, squealing sounds on the Hu-ch'in (bamboo bow-and-string instrument), by others tapping wood blocks, striking cymbals, plunking rudimentary banjos. Their approaches to harmony are painful to western ears; their rhythms are often complex syncopations, recognizable by jazz enthusiasts...
...Circumferences." When Iowa's Ernest Horn became wrought up over the inadequacy of the English alphabet to represent sounds accurately, he started calculating-14 sounds for "s," 22 for "long e," 21 for "ir," etc. Variant spellings for "ir" intrigued him: (h) er, (s) ir, (ch) or (ade), (c) er (tain), err, (theat)re (m)yrrh. For lowan reasons were included (n)ear, (hon)or. When he finished with "circumference," he figured 396,000,000 phonetic spellings...