Word: vowel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Branching Out. In London, as an art student, Yeats began to hear professorial excitement over the vowel sounds ("I scarcely knew what a vowel was") in his Innisfree. He talked to Shaw and Kropotkin and William Morris at Kelmscott House; to Arthur Symons and Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson and Edmund Dulac-the "tragic generation" of the fin-de-siècle-at the Rhymers' Club; to John Todhunter and the intense young clerks of the Southwark Irish Society...
...attempts to make a foreign alphabet of 26 letters do the work of 42 are pitiable. We write the same vowel twice to give it a different sound. . . . We also double the following consonant ... or make two consonants represent simple sounds . . . for which the Latin alphabet does not provide. . . . Those who think this a satisfactory solution overlook the stupendous fact that it takes twice as long to write two letters as to write...
...Illustrated with drawings and some 15,000 sentences showing how words are used, the dictionary is simple, easy to use. Handiest short cut: an inverted e (a), called the schwa (from Hebrew), takes the place of eight symbols customarily used to represent the same sound-the unaccented vowel in about, pencil, lemon, etc. On his definition of hearing Dr. Thorndike wasted no big words: "Sense by which sound is perceived. The old man's hearing is poor...