Word: germanics
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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...ministry may have charms for me. In either case, dead Latin and Greek are better than living English, German, and French to inspire me for future work...
NOTHING astonishes a German or a Frenchman, when beginning the study of English, more than our vowel-sounds, unless perhaps our consonant-sounds. The English language abounds in vowels which are little better than grunts. We have hosts of curt little vowels that seem to be the remnants of some full sounds which a continual press of business prevents us from ever completing. One of the most hybrid and unsatisfactory of these - to take an instance - is our short o, as in hot. It is quite interesting to speculate as to what the full sound can be which is swallowed...
...sound, as is evident from his humorous treatment of Polish. He wrote a poem on the adventures of Krapulinski and Waschlapski, and he also made public the memoirs of Count Schnabelewopski, introducing the family servant, Prrschtzztwitsch, and other names, of which he says that, though they seem harsh in German, they are extremely melodious in Polish...
Since we find Heine's appreciation of the singularities of Slavonic names so great, we can hardly expect that he held his peace in regard to our extraordinary sounds. Accordingly, in his "History of German Religion and Philosophy" we find a very witty illustration which is quite to the point. He gives an account of a man fabricated by an English mechanician. This manufactured man did credit to the author of his being, lacking only a soul, A sort of feeling the creature had in its leathern breast; and this feeling, Heine maliciously observes, was not essentially different from...
...beautiful reigned supreme, uncontaminated by the more artificial tastes of later times, when genius commanded the respect and position which gold does now, and painters and sculptors held a rank second to none in the estimation of the people. In modern schools of art-the French and German, for example-we find much of good, but fail to discover any lofty devotion to the cause; for the money-getting mania of the nineteenth century rules even men of genius, and much rubbish is cast upon the world in the shape of carelessly executed work. Still, we here find much...