Quotes About Phonetics

Why is S-A-S pronounced S-A-W? It should be Ar-Kansas. Did Kansas object?

It is also interesting to note that the greatest grammarian in Sanskrit (indeed possibly in any language), namely P??ini, who systematized and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin (he describes his village on the banks of the river Kabul).

The Proto-Canaanite ... seems to have employed 27 different characters. The Ugaritic alphabet from around the 14th century BCE uses 30 characters ... Phoenician had by the 12th century BCE already dropped five characters ... 22 consonantal phonemes.

The Babylonian system of accents is similar to the Tiberian, with small variations.

Some of the more outstanding features of Ugaritic are its preservation of most of the Proto-Semitic consonantal phonemes.

Reacher had no patience for people who claimed that y was a vowel.

Again, the first o in borogoves is pronounced like the o in borrow. I have heard people try to give it the sound of the o in worry. Such is Human Perversity.

The first o in borogoves is pronounced like the o in borrow. I have heard people try to give it the sound of the o in worry. Such is Human Perversity.

The "i" in "slithy" is long, as in "writhe"; and "toves" is pronounced so as to rhyme with "groves." Again, the first "o" in "borogoves" is pronounced like the "o" in "borrow." I have heard people try to give it the sound of the "o" in "worry." Such is Human Perversity.

And what sound does ough make? As somone once noted, "A rough, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." This should be read by the learned as "A ruff, doe-faced, thawtful plowman strode throo the streets of Scarboruh; after falling into a sloo, he coffed and hiccupped." Quite a language we have here.

The words in this book are all phooey. When you say them, your lips will make slips and back flips and your tongue may end up in Saint Looey!

Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.

Who would have thought that a story about a professor of phonetics would result in it being probably one of the great shows ever for musical theatre? It's a seemingly odd subject.

I learned by watching my favorite shows. I would just rewind and say the words back, until they sounded right to me. I never studied the American accent, in terms of getting a teacher or taking phonetics classes. I've always been a good mimic. It really wasn't that hard for me.

Lymph, v.: to walk with a lisp.

The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells."

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

I trained as a classical actor in London for three years. We did Tennessee Williams and dialect and accent classes; they were one of my favorite things to do each week. And we'd strip it down to the phonetics and listen to the sound. It was a really interesting way to look at it all.

A syllabary is a system in which each syllable of the language is represented by its own sign.

The Semitic signs were given names that served as mnemonics for the respective sounds: alf, bet, and so on.

The opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy.

APHÆRESIS  (APHÆ'RESIS)   n.s.[   figure in grammarthat takes away a letter or syllable from the beginning of a word.

C might be omitted in the language without loss, since one of its sounds might be supplied by, s, and the other by k, but that it preserves to the eye the etymology of words, as face from facies, captive from captivus.

C, according to English orthography, never ends a word; therefore we write stick, block, which were originally, sticke, blocke. In such words c is now mute.