Word: vowel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1870-1879
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most flagrant sinners against the canons of good taste in pronunciation in college, I have distinguished three well-defined classes: the Western, the Southern, and the New England. The first two, while doing justice, as a general rule, to the vowel o, manifest a decided aversion to the broad a (as in father), with an inclination to make the r painfully distinct. Untrammelled by dictionaries, both pronounce such words as aunt, haunt, daunt, cant, etc., ant, hant, dant, cant, while half and laugh are emasculated into haff and laff. Iron, which authority allows us to charitably call iurn, is contorted...
...used to denote a florid, pompous manner of writing"; "from this ardor," too, "springs a pronunciation unusually rapid," contracting "two short syllables into one," and pronouncing words "terminating with a liquid, particularly with l, m, or n, in such a manner as to leave out the sound of the vowel: thus, Sweden, Britain, garden, vessel, are extensively pronounced Swed'n, Brit'n, gard'n, vess'l. The syllable ing they abbreviate into en. They also omit the aspirate in words beginning with wh; for example, wheat and wharf are made weat and warf." Do any traces of these peculiarities still...
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...
...bringing this host of new vowel-sounds into our language, we have not been entirely the losers, - indeed, we have kept most of the old full vowels, using them, however, infrequently. The only sound that seems irrevocably gone from our tongue is a full sonorous o, such as is found in Italian and German, and, though a little shorter, in French as well...