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More "Alphabet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the alphabet," Polly advised him, rather proud to be able to answer him so promptly. "Bars, cars, fars, jars—that way, you know. How I found out is that Sister Winnie writes so ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... should rebel at their being taught even Bible verses by novices. Why, it isn't allowed in public schools. The days have gone by when anybody is supposed to be smart enough to teach children to drawl through the alphabet. We have the best of trained teachers even for that work, why should the Sunday-school not need them even ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... alphabet," suggested Maud. "Say all the names you can think of beginning with A and then B, and so on. Maybe you will stumble across one that you recognize as ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... their containing many Things abstruse or insignificant to us, it will probably be fifty Years before the Whole can be gone thro' in this Manner of Publication. There are likewise in those Books continual References from Things under one Letter of the Alphabet to those under another, which relate to the same Subject, and are necessary to explain and compleat it; those are taken in their Turn may perhaps be Ten Years distant; and since it is likely that they who desire to acquaint themselves with ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... arrow-heads of the oldest form pointing in all directions, while all the intervening spaces were filled up with woven characters half-way in appearance between Runes and Cryptic-Sanskrit. Round the borders these characters ran into a wild maze, a perfect jungle of an alphabet through which none but a wizard could have forced a way ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... dots and dashes. Telegraph the word "cat," using the alphabet shown on the next page. Telegraph your own name; ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... Aunt Martha better than I had expected, for though I thought her looks very terrible at first—and she was certainly firm—she was really kind and gentle. Under her instruction I gained the first knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, of which I was before profoundly ignorant. Of course she was very gentle with Ellen, as everybody was, and Fanny seemed to be very fond of her. She was courageous, too, as I before long had evidence. I remember one night being suddenly lifted in her arms, and carried out ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... properly. As to his yol for l (a compendious delivery of the provincial eh-al), and other metropolitan refinements, amazing to all but cockneys, they cannot be indicated, save in the above imperfect manner, without the aid of a phonetic alphabet. He is dressed in somebody else's very second best as a coast-guardsman, and gives himself the airs of a stage tar with sufficient success to pass as a possible fish porter of bad character in ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... air,—high jumps. Again they did it, and again. Then a low jump; then a high one. I caught the idea in a moment. They were telegraphing to our world, in the hope of an observer. Long leaps and short leaps,—the long and short of Morse's Telegraph Alphabet,—were communicating ideas. My paper and pencil had been of course before me. I jotted down the despatch, whose language I ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... under his care. He answered, that he was sorry to say that they were in a state of great ignorance, very few of the common people being able either to read or write; that with respect to schools, there was but one in the place, where four or five children were taught the alphabet, but that even this was at present closed; he informed me, however, that there was a school at Colhares, about a league distant. Amongst other things, he said that nothing more surprised him than to see Englishmen, the most learned ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... realm of popular knowledge, and information of this class sought only in a clandestine manner. The people have suffered by deplorable ignorance on those topics, which should be as familiar to us as the alphabet. Dr. Napheys, by his scientific handling of the physiological points which relate to health, training, and development, has rendered a great service to the world. This, the press, and public men, have not been slow to acknowledge. The book has gained ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... enveloped, for the purpose of enslaving, plundering, and imposing upon mankind, it is of all things the least mysterious and the most easy to be understood. The meanest capacity cannot be at a loss, if it begins its enquiries at the right point. Every art and science has some point, or alphabet, at which the study of that art or science begins, and by the assistance of which the progress is facilitated. The same method ought to be observed with respect ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... in Boston. This old gentleman came from London in 1637, and had been teaching school ever since; so that there were now aged men, grandfathers like myself, to whom Master Cheever had taught their alphabet. He was a person of venerable aspect, and ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and forgive! heaven's alphabet Hath many a word of mystery; I read not all thy record yet, Though perseveringly I try; But teach me, Lord! and none shall be More prompt, more pleased to ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... four walls had, at ground level, a narrow entrance, plastered without a trace of woodwork. This opened into a vestibule containing a dirt-encrusted staircase which spiraled upward. They were each labeled with one of the first four letters of the alphabet painted on ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... correctly without referring to the book. It will then be well to clear the board of all but a single Piece, and practise with that until perfect in its movements; another, and then another, may be added, until the action of every one is as familiar as the alphabet. ...
— The Blue Book of Chess - Teaching the Rudiments of the Game, and Giving an Analysis - of All the Recognized Openings • Howard Staunton and "Modern Authorities"
... was a success. Gillian was at home, and every one found congeners. Lady Merrifield's sister, Miss Mohun, pounced upon Miss Prescott as a coadjutor in the alphabet of good works needed in the neglected district of Arnscombe, where Mr. Earl was wifeless, and the farm ladies heedless; but they were interrupted by Mysie running up to claim Miss Prescott for a game at croquet. "Uncle Redgie was so glad to see the hoops come into fashion again," ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... are known as the syllabic characters was undoubtedly Mr. Evans' greatest work, and to his unaided genius belongs the honour of devising and then perfecting this alphabet which has been such a blessing to thousands of Cree Indians. The principle on which the characters are formed is the phonetic. There are no silent letters. Each character represents a syllable, hence no spelling is required. As soon as the alphabet is mastered, the student can commence at the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... where an armchair was placed in front of a small desk below a large instrument panel. The gauges and dials on the panel, and the levers and switches and buttons on the desk control board, were all lettered and numbered with characters not of the Roman alphabet or the Arabic notation, and, within instant reach of the occupant of the chair, a pistollike weapon lay on the desk. It had a conventional index-finger trigger and a hand-fit grip, but, instead of a tubular barrel, two ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... they all rejected thee with disdain. (34) Then my children came to Sinai, they accepted thee, and they honored thee. And now, on the day of their distress, thou standest up against them?" Hearing this, the Torah stepped aside, and did not testify. "Let the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in which Torah is written come and testify against Israel," said God. They appeared without delay, and Alef, the first letter, was about to testify against Israel, when Abraham interrupted it with the words: "Thou chief of all letters, thou comest to testify against Israel in the time ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... design'd them; and consequently, that the World is deprived of so much Benefit, as otherwise it might have reap'd from his prodigious Learning, and Force of Judgment. One may see by the first Volume of his Dictionary, which goes through but two Letters of the Alphabet, that he forecasted to make that Work three times as large as it is, cou'd he have waited for the Printer's Money so long as was requisite to the finishing it according to his first Design. Thus much I thought fit to say, in order to abate the Edge of ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... between the sound and the animal designated, but because we have agreed that that sound shall represent that object. So, also, we have agreed that the characters h-o-r-s-e shall represent the same thing; and by the use of twenty-six characters, called the alphabet, placed together in various combinations, we are able to write ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... thin, and apparently very exhausted; gradually a party of ten assembled, and we gathered round the witch's table. The majority were ladies—those adorers of the marvellous! The names of friends were called for; the ladies took the alphabet, and running over it with the point of a pencil, the spirit rapped as the wished-for letter was reached. John Davis was soon spelt, each letter probably having been indicated by the tremulous touch of affectionate hope. Harriet Mercer was then rapped out by the ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... mixed up s's and x's Like an alphabet coming to strife. It seemed the discordant echo Of a row ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... south of the stream are upper and lower Moesia, consisting of the slope of the Thracian mountains northward to the river, with the plains between it and them. This district you must notice for its importance in forming the Moeso-Gothic alphabet, in which "the Greek is by far the principal element",[28] giving sixteen letters out of the twenty-four. The Gothic invasion under the reign of Valens is the first that establishes a Teutonic nation within the frontier ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... recognition of the one true God, which they recite daily, early and toward evening, and as to which they persuade themselves that it is the most efficacious safeguard against idolatry, fortified wherewith they can not lapse from true to false religion. The other secret alphabet consisted in this, that in inversed order they change the last letter [Hebrew: T] with the first [Hebrew: '], and this and another in turn, and so on through the rest, which inversion it is the custom ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... their kindness. I have that twist in my brain, which is the curse of my countrymen—a sort of devilish quickness at doing well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing that makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets, and keeps them dunces before the alphabet. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... hurry him. He had the world beyond the hills; I this one, where a slow full river flowed from the sounding mill under our garden wall, through long meadows. In Winter the wild ducks made letters of the alphabet flying. On the other side of the copses bounding our home, there was a park containing trees old as the History of England, John Thresher said, and the thought of their venerable age enclosed me comfortably. He ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in a little market-town not far from Upsala, a peasant who lived there with his family, digging the earth during the week and singing in the choir on Sundays. This peasant had a little daughter to whom he taught the musical alphabet before she knew how to read. Daae's father was a great musician, perhaps without knowing it. Not a fiddler throughout the length and breadth of Scandinavia played as he did. His reputation was widespread and he was always invited to ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... nuisances, widely destructive to our literature. Their mode of training will explain the nature of the danger. The infant reciting bore is trained much after the manner of a learned pig. Before the quadruped are placed, on certain bits of dirty greasy cards, the letters of the alphabet, or short nonsensical phrases interrogatory with their answers, such as "Who is the greatest rogue in company?" "Which lady or gentleman in company will be married first?" By the alternate use of blows and bribes of such food as pleases the pig, the animal is brought to ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... of the people of India is disclosed by the recent census. Ninety-five per cent of the men and more than 99 per cent of the women have never learned the first letter of the alphabet, and would not recognize their own name it written or printed. I have been told by ladies engaged in missionary and educational work that grown people of the lower classes cannot even distinguish one picture from another; that their mental perceptions are entirely blank, and ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... calm. Whilst, indeed, it seems tossed like a shuttlecock on the engulphing waves, it is in reality being most skilfully piloted. The veteran at the stern we could not see, but doubtless his skill was equally remarkable. The two, of course, act in concert, both knowing the river as other folks their alphabet. ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... never learnt to read and write. If any o' dem was caught trying to learn to read or write, dey was whipped bad. I kotched on to what de white chilluns said, and learnt by myself to say de alphabet. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... commencing the study of Greek, and seized it with avidity. That language had never been totally extinct in Italy; but at the time on which we are touching, there were not probably six persons in the whole country acquainted with it. Dante had quoted Greek authors, but without having known the Greek alphabet. The person who favoured Petrarch with this coveted instruction was Bernardo Barlaamo, a Calabrian monk, who had been three years before at Avignon, having come as envoy from Andronicus, the eastern Emperor, on pretext of proposing a union between the Greek and Roman churches, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... completed, always, and did not necessarily terminate with the last letter occurring in the cryptographic message. A subsequent inspection of this curious code has enabled Nayland Smith, by a process of simple deduction, to compile the entire alphabet employed by Dr. Fu-Manchu's agent, Samarkan, in communicating with his awful superior. With a little patience, any one of my readers my achieve the same result (and I should be pleased to hear from ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... At first he tried writing within oblongs cut out of cardboard, but the result was apt to be illegible. In 1891 he conceived the device of having a series of squares cut out in card, and inventing an alphabet, of which each letter was made of lines, which could be written along the edges of the squares, and dots, which could be marked at the corners. The thing worked well, and he named it the "Typhlograph," but, at the ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... windows. For he is at the moment advertising the most undesirable article in the world, a commodity for which I can conceive of no demand whatever. Yet there—the result of the caprice of adhesive cement or the desire of one letter of the alphabet to get level with its neighbour and be dropped too—the amazing notice is, in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... richest jokes, and one which he always enjoyed telling, related to a country singing school which was located in the neighborhood of Pierceton, in which reading (the alphabet, at least), spelling, geography, arithmetic, rules of grammar, and so forth, were still taught by a process of singing. The method adopted in this form of education was to have the scholar memorize all knowledge by singing it. Thus in the case of geography the students would sing ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... Phoenicians, far more enterprising than either, must have been fully acquainted with their means of written communication—and indeed we are assured that they were so. Now, if a Phoenician had imparted so much of the art to Greece as the knowledge of a written alphabet, is it probable that he would have suffered the communication to cease there! The Phoenicians were a commercial people—their colonies in Greece were for commercial purposes,—would they have wilfully and voluntarily neglected the most convenient mode of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... begins with a side-table of hors d'oeuvres, called "zakouska." That may not be spelled right, but no Russian would correct me, because the language is phonetic, and they spell the same word in many different ways. Their alphabet has thirty-eight letters in it, besides the little marks to tell you whether to make ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... within recent years that the Serbs and the Croats in the south-west corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire have begun to realise that the only things which divide them one from the other are a difference of religion and a difference of alphabet; and now that the realisation of this fact has spread from the study to the market-place, we see the formation of a new nationality, that of the Serbo-Croats. The researches of historians and other learned men have done an immense deal to stimulate ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... manage to tint and gradate tenderly with the pencil point, get a good large alphabet, and try to tint the letters into shape with the pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure their height and extreme breadth with the compasses, as a b, a c, Fig. 3, and then scratch in their shapes gradually; the letter ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... gentleness with firmness; and if these had not been sufficient, she had reserves of character which would have given her the mastery over much less plastic material than these ignorant but eager young people. The work of instruction was simple enough, for most of the pupils began with the alphabet, which they acquired from Webster's blue-backed spelling-book, the palladium of Southern education at that epoch. The much abused carpet-baggers had put the spelling-book within reach of every child of school age in North Carolina,—a fact which is often overlooked when the carpet-baggers ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... 1752-1817, was born at Northampton, Massachusetts. His mother was a daughter of the celebrated Jonathan Edwards. It is said that she taught her son the alphabet in one lesson, that he could read the Bible at four years of age, and that he studied Latin by himself at six. He graduated at Yale in 1769, returned as tutor in 1771, and continued six years. He was chaplain in a brigade ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... certainly Parthian, exists in the gorge of Sir-pul-i-zohab, and has been recently published in the great work of M. Flandin. [PLATE VIII.] The inscription on this monument, though it has not yet been deciphered, appears to be written in the alphabet found upon the Parthian coins. The monument seems to represent a Parthian king, mounted on horseback, and receiving a chaplet at the hand of a subject. The king wears a cap bound round with the diadem, the long ends of which depend over his shoulder. He ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... occurrences were as simple as the alphabet to Uncle Robin. He would explain it as a sight reflected on the cloud and thrown on a sea of mist or a desert as on a screen, using difficult words, like "refraction," and words from Euclid, like "angles." But Uncle Alan ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... contain the alphabet in Lombardic capitals; but the inscription and date on each ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... languages, it will be at once apparent, that to seize upon, and note from the sound, a word belonging to one country, so as to compare its sound and accentuation with a word belonging to another country, needs a thorough knowledge of the genius of the two languages, and of their alphabet, through which alone the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... during her seventeen years' occupancy of the chair in which she sat. Upon the flyleaf was inscribed "Aphorisms: by Eugenie Ram." It was her intent to publish this darling work when beneath each letter of the alphabet twelve ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... philosophically explain the transition from sensation to thought, from thought to word, from the word to its hieroglyphic presentment, from hieroglyphics to the alphabet, from the alphabet to written language, of which the eloquent beauty resides in a series of images, classified by rhetoric, and forming, in a sense, the hieroglyphics of thought? Was it not the ancient mode of representing ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... full of original power. Through reading, lecturing, and experimenting, he had become thoroughly familiar with electrical science: he saw where light was needed and expansion possible. The phenomena of ordinary electric induction belonged, as it were, to the alphabet of his knowledge: he knew that under ordinary circumstances the presence of an electrified body was sufficient to excite, by induction, an unelectrified body. He knew that the wire which carried an electric current was an electrified body, and still that all attempts had failed to make ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... conveniences of life too well Leave me in peace; be assured that I can put no heir in danger Most intriguing little Carmelite in the kingdom Princes thus accustomed to be treated as divinities Princess at 12 years was not mistress of the whole alphabet Taken pains only to render himself beloved by his pupil The Jesuits were suppressed The King delighted to manage the most disgraceful points To be formally mistress, a husband had to be found Ventured to give ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... B." I had no ambitions in that direction. My views on the subject of ornamental initials and sampler autographs were put into pregnant English at a subsequent date by the elder Weller. He professed to have received at second-hand from the charity-boy, set to con the alphabet, what the retired stage-driver applied to matrimony—to wit, that it was not worth while to go through so much to get so little. Knitting delighted not me, nor ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... honoured, emancipated, mitred, crowned, adored—who loses anything, that does not find it.' 'And what matters it,' says the philosophic wisdom, speaking in the abstract, 'what name it is proclaimed in, and what letters of the alphabet we know it by?—what matter is it, so that they spell the name that is good for ALL, and good for each,'—for that is the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Louvre, the Luxembourg, the Salon, insisting with a feverish eloquence and invention that he should worship all that she worshipped—no matter if he did not understand!—let him worship all the same—till he had learnt his new alphabet with a smiling docility, and caught her very tricks of phrase. Especially were they haunters of the sculptures in the Louvre, where, because of the difficulty of it, she piqued herself most especially on knowledge, and could convict him most triumphantly ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... feverishly to working from a different viewpoint. From the cryptic snarl came presently the single English word in the cipher—his name. The keen suspicion of his hot brain had, at last, been right. For every letter in the alphabet, four symbols had been used interchangeably but whether they pointed up or down or right or left, their significance was the same. There were no ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... who knew Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend. On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University, despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, "Educate a boy, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... "shin," which is some like our "sh" in its effect, is a very pretty letter, and enough of them would make very attractive trimming for pantalets or other clothing. The entire Arabic alphabet, I think, would work up first-rate into trimming for aprons, skirts, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... Psalms, and other matter, were taught also in the Latin schools, where probably Luther, too, learned them. In the Instruction for Visitors, Melanchthon still mentions "der Kinder Handbuechlein, darin das Alphabet, Vaterunser, Glaub' und andere Gebet' innen stehen—Manual for Children, containing the alphabet, the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and other prayers," as the first schoolbook. (W. 26, 237.) After the invention of printing, chart-impressions with pictures illustrating ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Immediately underneath was a wilderness of roofs. Farther along were the railway tracks that Yates objected to; and a line of masts and propeller funnels marked the windings of Buffalo Creek, along whose banks arose numerous huge elevators, each marked by some tremendous letter of the alphabet, done in white paint against the somber brown of the big building. Still farther to the west was a more grateful and comforting sight for a hot day. The blue lake, dotted with white sails and an occasional ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... little is known beyond the fact that the letters of the alphabet were used to represent pitches. This method was probably accurate enough, but it was cumbersome, and did not afford any means of writing "measured music" nor did it give the eye any opportunity of grasping the general ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... musician! He had a new pleasure in turning this over in his mind. Of all the closed doors which his choice of a career had left along his pathway, no other had for him such a magical fascination as that on which was graven the lute of Orpheus. He knew not even the alphabet of music, and his conceptions of its possibilities ran but little beyond the best of the hymn-singing he had heard at Conferences, yet none the less the longing for it raised on occasion such mutiny in his soul that more than once he had ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... had an opportunity of learning, he set himself to read with such close application that, from being comparatively thin, the effect of having been fond of the chase, he became quite corpulent from want of exercise. Mr. Oswell gave him his first lesson in figures, and he acquired the alphabet on the first day of my residence at Chonuane. He was by no means an ordinary specimen of the people, for I never went into the town but I was pressed to hear him read some chapters of the Bible. Isaiah was a ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... for every letter of the alphabet, each illustrated by a full page picture in colors. The verses appeal to the child's sense of humor without being foolish or sensational, and will be welcomed by kindergartners for teaching rhythm ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... passage of the current, would fall back when the current was interrupted. This movement of the plate thus obtained, Harding could easily fasten to it a needle arranged on a dial, bearing the letters of the alphabet, and in this way communicate from one ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... for an hour or two, in the year 1801, when, amidst Napoleon's mighty projects for remodelling the religion and government of his empire, the ironical satirist, Sylvain Marechal, thrust in his "Plan for a Law prohibiting the Alphabet to Women." Daring, keen, sarcastic, learned, the little tract retains to-day so much of its pungency, that we can hardly wonder at the honest simplicity of the author's friend and biographer, Madame Gacon Dufour, who declared that he must be partially insane, and proceeded to prove ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... I know his taste to a hair, and if ever I did, he must have doted on that author. What took him was a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word; the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the alphabet: the romance of language. His honest head was very nearly empty, his intellect like a child's; and when he read his favourite authors, he can almost never have understood what he was reading. Yet the taste was not only genuine, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the room in which Armand Monnier was seated, his chin propped on his hand, his elbow resting on a table, looking abstractedly into space. In a corner of the room two small children were playing languidly with a set of bone tablets, inscribed with the letters of the alphabet. But whatever the children were doing with the alphabet, they were certainly not ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... association affected Damaris but dimly, since speaking a language of which she barely knew the alphabet. Carteret they took in a different measure. He read their direction and potency with clear understanding, the insidious provocations and satisfactions of them printed in large type. With a rush, his youth returned and troubled him. Or was it the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... conductor, born in London and still a cockney, has succeeded in extracting thrills from the alphabet—imparting excitement to the names of the national capitol's streets. On a recent Sunday morning he was calling ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... phrenologically, after mature deliberation, conclude to descend to a little harmless amusement, contriving, however, to mingle some instructive elements with the frivolous ones that less enlightened spirits delight in. For instance, the flowers, that are truly the "alphabet of angels" to the simple souls that love the violets and daisies for their own sweet sakes, offer a very different alphabet to the "Schoolma'ams" and Professors. They are no longer flowers, but specimens, each bud and blossom pleading ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... disc. Captain Hardy laid the disc beside the dollar on the table, and painstakingly examined again the marks on the coin. After a time he took a sheet of paper and across it in a row wrote down the letters of the alphabet. Then he picked up the message and made check marks below the letters in his alphabet as he found those letters in the message. When he had gone through the message, ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... sometimes endowed. We have a school here, directed with as much perseverance as enlightened patience, which already offers the most satisfactory results; by a very ingenious method, the mental and physical capacities are exercised at the same time; and many have been taught the alphabet, figures, and to distinguish colors; they have also succeeded in teaching them to sing in chorus; and I assure you, madame, that there is a kind of strange charm, at once sad and touching, in hearing ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... plus and minus. Four days later, he was beginning multiplication and division. In four months' time, he knew how to extract square and cubic roots; and, soon after, he learnt to spell and read by means of the conventional alphabet devised by Krall. ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... alliterative names adopted at that time. Look over the magazines and Annuals of those years, and you will find many such, as "Mary Maywood," "Dora Dashwood," "Ella Ellwood" "Fanny Forrester," "Fanny Fern," "Jennie June," "Minnie Myrtle," and so on through the alphabet, one almost expecting to find a "Ninny Noodle." Examining one of Mrs. Lippincott's first scrapbooks of "Extracts from Newspapers," etc., which she had labelled, "Vanity, all is Vanity," I find many ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... not long ago, in one of his charming essays, that almost persuade the reader, "Ought women to learn the alphabet?" and added, "Give woman, if you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to the career," his physiology was not equal to his wit. Women will learn the alphabet at any rate; and man will be powerless to prevent them, should he undertake ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... himself with a long pole, and stood by a sandy portion of ground, upon which he had no difficulty in tracing what letters and characters he wished. With due preparation and importance he marked out the first letter of the German alphabet, and then, straightening himself up, demanded in a thundering tone "vot dat was." His two sons looked mute and dumbfounded. They had not the remotest idea in the world of its name and significance. For over three months the patient father had instructed ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... the Lord Mayor of London by a country clergyman, to give, as a warning to others, publicity to a letter he had just received from the East. The clergyman, it seems, had advertised in the 'Times' for pupils, and gave for address a certain letter of the Greek alphabet. To this address there came in due time an answer from a gentleman, dated Constantinople, stating that he was an Anglo-Indian on his way to England, to place his two sons in an educational establishment; but that having, by an excursion to Jerusalem, exhausted his immediate resources, ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... think that to teach anything well it is necessary to know only that one thing. That young woman who undertakes to teach a primary school, or even an infant class, has mistaken her calling if she supposes that because she has to teach only the alphabet or the "table card," she has therefore no need to know many other things. There are some things which every teacher needs. Every teacher needs a cultivated taste, a disciplined intellect, and that enlargement of views which results ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... cause. He felt no resentment for his misguided assailant—he would willingly have exposed himself to a second attack, could he have thus restored her reason. The memento of the crucifixion—that Catholic alphabet, the crucifix—held up unto his soul the wondrous truth that God had voluntarily suffered, for the sake of man, all that humanity can endure; and the youth interiorly acknowledged that the errors of his life were but imperfectly balanced by the ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... Plaatje pursued his interests in language and linguistics by collaborating with Professor Daniel Jones of the University of London — inventor of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and prototype for Professor Higgins in Shaw's "Pygmalion" and thus the musical "My Fair Lady". In the same year as Native Life was published, 1916, Plaatje published two other shorter books which brought together the European languages (English, ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... tripled now. Read my letter once and again. Preserve it as a sacred deposit. Lay it under your pillow. Meditate upon it fasting. Commit it to memory, and repeat the scattered parcels of it, as Caesar is said to have done the Greek alphabet, to cool your rising choler. Be this the amulet to preserve you from danger! Be this the chart by which to steer the little skiff of your political system safe into ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... domestic management depends the preservation of their fortune Prevent disorder from organising itself Princes thus accustomed to be treated as divinities Princess at 12 years was not mistress of the whole alphabet Rabble, always ready to insult genius, virtue, and misfortune Saw no other advantage in it than that of saving her own life She often carried her economy to a degree of parsimony Shocking to find so little a man in the son of the Marechal Shun all ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... witch! That is, I can put two and two together, and read men, though I don't read the alphabet. Well, one reading is a good deal rarer than the other. So you mean to disobey the Hawk to-night? I like you for that. But listen here—did you ever ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the list of December, 1892, he named the Golden type, from The Golden Legend, which was to have been the first book printed with it. This fount consists of eighty-one designs, including stops, figures, and tied letters. The lower case alphabet was finished in a few months. The first letter having been cut in Great Primer size by Mr. Prince, was thought too large, and 'English' was the size resolved upon. By the middle of August, 1890, eleven punches had been cut. At the end of the ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... his untiring energy that the Political Union owed much of its success. In his later years he printed (partly with his own hands) one of the strangest works ever issued from the press, being nothing less than an alphabet, grammar, and dictionary of a new and universal language. On this he must have spent an immense amount of philosophical and philological research during the busiest years of his active life, but like other schemes of ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... about him (which he has not an eye to follow in its fantastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce to fixed principles), to the quiet monotony of the dead languages, and the less startling and more intelligible combinations of the letters of the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly well. 'Leave me to my repose,' is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without a miracle, to 'take up his bed and walk,' as expect the learned reader ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... she saw the last of them go clattering, whirling up the street through the bazaar. The old hag rose out of a shadow and trotted after her again as she turned and rode on, pale-faced and crying now a little, to the little begged school place where her father tried to din the alphabet into a dozen ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Epoch of Reform, the modern "secular" or "civil" alphabet was substituted for the ancient Church Slavonic, and the modern Russian language, which Lomonosoff did so much to improve, began to assume shape, literature and science at last freeing themselves completely from ecclesiasticism ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... good-natured looking policemen, whose function I cannot explain, but it was agreeable to see them again. There was no order or organisation of any kind to protect and annoy you. The authorities had thoughtfully painted the letters of the alphabet on the platform where the luggage was deposited, and you were supposed to find your own trunks in front of your own letter. I, full of German ideas still, waited a weary time near my letter. "You'll never get them that way," said an English friend. "You'd ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... you stop or stay, or turn your feet from out your way, say but the word that is spelled with the fourteenth and fifteenth letters of the alphabet three times in a loud voice, and all will go well with ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... since it was not always possible to get a consistent answer to the question as to what part of a sentence constitutes a single word, and time was too limited for any extensive language study. The following alphabet has been ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... matter of typewriting. My brother-in-law owned a machine which he used in the day-time. In the night I was free to use it. That machine was a wonder. I could weep now as I recollect my wrestlings with it. It must have been a first model in the year one of the typewriter era. Its alphabet was all capitals. It was informed with an evil spirit. It obeyed no known laws of physics, and overthrew the hoary axiom that like things performed to like things produce like results. I'll swear that machine never did the same thing in the same ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... manuscript of Diego de Landa—Second Bishop of Yucatan, in 1573,—which was discovered and published by M. de Bourbourg. It contains an account of the manners and customs of the Maya Indians, a description of some of their chief towns; and more important than all besides, it furnishes an alphabet, which is the most probable key that is known to us for reading the hieroglyphics which are found upon many of the Yucatan ruins. The alphabet, though imperfect in itself, may at some future time explain, not only the inscriptions, but also the manuscripts of this ancient ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... elements are names only, and that definition or explanation begins when they are combined; the letters are unknown, the syllables or combinations are known. But this new hypothesis when tested by the letters of the alphabet is found to break down. The first syllable of Socrates' name is SO. But what is SO? Two letters, S and O, a sibilant and a vowel, of which no further explanation can be given. And how can any one be ignorant of either of them, and yet know both of them? There is, however, another ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... and as to the other side of a soldier's life, again he thought, what is it for?—to humour the arrogance of the proud,—to pamper the appetite of the full,—to tighten the grip of the iron hand of power;—and though it be sometimes for better ends, yet the soldier cannot choose what letters of the alphabet of obedience he will learn. Politics was the very shaking of the government sieve, where if there were any solid result it was accompanied with a very great flying about of chaff indeed. Society was nothing but whip syllabub,—a mere conglomeration of bubbles,—as ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... trouble of mind went from him, and at the end of the third day's idleness he made a drawing in chalk upon the deck, with letters of the alphabet at the angles. He pointed out that, though the piston-rod was more or less straight, the piston-rod cross-head—the thing that had been jammed sideways in the guides—had been badly strained, and had cracked the lower end of the piston-rod. He was going ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... teach her to read and write, but, whether from the teacher's inability to impart knowledge, or from some strange lack in the child's odd brain, Lib never learned the lesson. She could not read a word, she did not even know her alphabet. I cannot explain to myself or to you the one gift which gave her her homely village name. She told stories. I listened to many of them, and I took down from her lips several of these. They are, as you will see if you read them, "kind o' fables," as the country folk said. They ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... names of the French officials concerned were written at full length in the Department cipher. In making a copy for Congress, Secretary Pickering substituted for the names the terminal letters of the alphabet, and hence the report has passed into history ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... do this, not because it is startling, but because it is soothing. To people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in this vast and obvious manner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell. The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as a horseshoe in order to make the child jump; on the contrary, they use it ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... beginnings of what is called our Literature. Literature really means letters, for it comes from a Latin word littera, meaning a letter of the alphabet. Words are made by letters of the alphabet being set together, and our literature again by words being set together; hence ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... ranger's expression of amazement and admiration grew deeper and deeper, and his liking and respect for his young subordinate increased rapidly. Finally the ranger was given his first lesson in radio-telegraphy. While Lew was writing down for him the wireless alphabet, Charley was showing him how to make the letters on the spark-gap. Before they turned in for the night, the ranger had learned to distinguish the difference between the sound of a dot and of a dash as the signals ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... had given? But chiefly this, him First, him Last to view 15 Through meaner powers and secondary things Effulgent, as through clouds that veil his blaze. For all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical, one mighty alphabet For infant minds; and we in this low world 20 Placed with our backs to bright Reality, That we may learn with young unwounded ken The substance from its shadow. Infinite Love, Whose latence is the plenitude of All, Thou ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and the idea for which it is used is in this case through the sound of the name of the object depicted. That the early alphabets are of this type of rebus pictures appears in their names. The first three letters of the Hebrew alphabet, for example, are named, respectively, aleph which means ox, beth which means house, and gimmel ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... for the use of Colored pupils was erected in Washington, D. C., by three Colored men, named George Bell, Nicholas Franklin, and Moses Liverpool. Not one of this trio of Negro educators knew a letter of the alphabet; but having lived as slaves in Virginia, they had learned to appreciate the opinion that learning was of great price. They secured a white teacher, named Lowe, and put their ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... they cultivated no corn, their vegetable food consisting of batata(?) and banana. They had not a single domestic animal; they were acquainted with iron and gold, but with no other metal, and were clothed in stuffs of cotton and alpaca, woven by themselves. They had invented a peculiar phonetic alphabet; and their religion consisted in the belief in good and evil spirits and witches, in circumcision, and in somewhat of divination by the stars. They therefore were superior to the inhabitants of the South Sea, inasmuch as they possessed gold, iron, ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... beyond our fountain head, nor can we even dream beyond the souls of the two things who gave us birth. There are men born in this age of ripeness, born with an alphabet in their mouths and reared in the regal ways of learning, who can neither read nor write. And yet had Shakespeare been born without a language, he would have carved his thoughts as ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... dozen persons in that room could have perceived any difference in the two readings of a thesis written in a language of which even the alphabet was unknown known to them, yet every individual among them could keenly appreciate the magnanimity of Ishmael, who would have sacrificed his scholastic fame for his friend's benefit, and the quickness and integrity of Walter ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... have ventured to deviate from the very inconvenient Scandinavian arrangement, which puts þ, æ, œ, right at the end of the alphabet. ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... Ogham," so called because the letters resembled the branching of twigs from a stem. The Ogham alphabet was in use in Ireland in pre-Christian times, and many sepulchral inscriptions in it ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... criteria, the English stands alone in the highest rank; but as a written language, in the way in which its alphabet is used, the English has but ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell
... substance. Each wire ended in a stalk mounted with a little ball of elder-wood suspended by a silk thread. When a stream of electricity, no matter how slight., was sent through the wire, the elder-ball at the opposite end was repelled, such movement designating some letter of the alphabet. A few years later we find Arthur Young, in his Travels in France, describing a similar machine invented by a M. Lomond of Paris, the action of which he also describes.[12] In these and similar cases, though the idea was born and the model of the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... in the first edition of this pamphlet, that the Maya deities be designated by letters of the alphabet, has been very generally adopted by Americanists, especially by those in the United States of America. This circumstance, in particular, has seemed to make it desirable to prepare for publication a new edition, improved to accord with the present ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... bidder, annulled the wills made in favour of the bishoprics and abbeys, and sought to impose upon his subjects a rationalistic conception of the Trinity. He pretended to some literary culture, and was the author of some halting verse. He even added letters to the Latin alphabet, and wished to have the MSS. rewritten with the new characters. The wresting of Tours from Austrasia and the seizure of ecclesiastical property provoked the bitter hatred of Gregory of Tours, by whom Chilperic was stigmatized as the Nero and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... terms and names of branches of learning come from the Greek. In fact, nearly all the terms of learning and art, from the alphabet to the highest peaks of metaphysics and theology, come directly from the Greek— philosophy, logic, anthropology, psychology, aesthetics, grammar, rhetoric, history, philology, mathematics, arithmetic, astronomy, anatomy, geography, stenography, physiology, architecture, and hundreds more ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... descent of this people, which does not appear of terrestrial origin, but descended from some of the inhabitants of the moon, because the principal language spoken there, and in the centre of Africa, is very nearly the same. Their alphabet and method of writing are pretty much the same, and show the extreme antiquity of this people, and their exalted origin. I here give you a specimen of their writing [Vide Otrckocsus de Orig. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... of the Syndicate had no individual names. The spring-armoured ships were termed "repellers," and were numbered, and the crabs were known by the letters of the alphabet. Each repeller was in charge of a Director of Naval Operations; and the whole naval force of the Syndicate was under the command of a Director-in-chief. On this momentous occasion this officer was on board of Repeller No. 1, and ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton
... the Doctor, who had studied long in Germany, and become an authority on mental diseases, developed a distaste for therapeutics, and a passion for research and the laboratory. There was the Lawyer, who knew international law as he knew his Greek alphabet, and hated a court room. There was the Violinist, who was known the world over in musical sets,—everywhere, except in the concert room. There was the Journalist, who had travelled into almost as many queer places as Richard Burton, seen more wars, ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... beginning has no restriction, but may be applied to action, state, material, extent, enumeration, or to whatever else may be conceived of as having a first part, point, degree, etc. The letter A is at the beginning (not the commencement) of every alphabet. If we were to speak of the commencement of the Pacific Railroad, we should be understood to refer to the enterprise and its initiatory act; if we were to refer to the roadway we should say "Here is the beginning of the Pacific Railroad." In the great majority of cases begin ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... had a curious method of keeping tally of events. They had no alphabet, and instead of writing they made use of strings of various make, colour, and length, and, with the addition of knots, more or less complicated, were able to place on ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... the proprietor's arm and led him to a carriage in waiting. Then he took him to Pine street, and introduced him, in the most deferential manner, to the broker who held half of New York at his disposal, and knew the city as he knew his alphabet. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... which has cost me many months' heavy work, 'while I bore burdens with dull patience and beat the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution[31],' I have, I hope, shown that I am not unmindful of all that I owe to men of letters. To the dead we cannot pay the debt of gratitude that is their due. Some relief is obtained from its burthen, if we in our turn make the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... him, gazed steadily into his eyes. Again he commanded him to do these ridiculous, degrading things. Howard felt himself weakening. He was suddenly seized with the feeling that he must obey. Amid roars of laughter he recited the entire alphabet standing on one leg, he crowed like a rooster, he hopped like a toad, and he crawled abjectly on his belly like a snake. One of the fellows told him afterward that he had been hypnotized. He had laughed at it then as a good joke, but now he came to think of it, perhaps it ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... his father died of injuries received in rescuing a person from drowning. At the age of 10 years Andrew was apprenticed to a tailor. His early education was almost entirely neglected, and, notwithstanding his natural craving to learn, he never spent a day in school. Was taught the alphabet by a fellow-workman, borrowed a book, and learned to read. In 1824 removed to Laurens Court-House, S.C., where he worked as a journeyman tailor. In May, 1826, returned to Raleigh, and in September, with his mother and stepfather, set out for Greeneville, Tenn., ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... many answering needles. The going-away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them, as there was a common link. A, B, and C make a party. A dies. B not only loses A, but all A's part in C. C loses A's part in B, and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables. I express myself muddily, capite dolente. I have a dulling cold. My theory is to enjoy life; but my practice is against it. I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... its officers' excursions into Kent and Essex, its dealing with the Plague, the disposal of its goods at the Reformation, &c., &c., and will help our members to realize the church-life of its time. The third Text will be Part I of An Alphabet of Tales, avery interesting collection, englisht in the Northern Dialect, about 1440, from the Latin Alphabetum Narrationum by Etienne de Bsanon, and edited by Mrs. M.M. Banks from the unique MS. in the King's Library in the British Museum; the above-named ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... words that came to his ear. Some boys looked to see how red his eyes were: some were surprised to see him abroad, and hinted a favouritism because he was not shut up in the school-room. Some asked whether he could say his alphabet yet; and others whether he could spell "dunce." The most cruel thing of all was to see Tooke in particularly high spirits. He kept away from Hugh; but Hugh's eye followed him from afar, and saw that he capered and laughed, and was gayer than at any time this half-year. Hugh saw into his heart (or ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... Bourbonism, or Orleanism, or each in its turn. It is rather strange that, with such an experience, Paris should not take refuge in that tame but enduring system of street nomenclature which is based on the letters of the alphabet and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... and then by his watching the forefinger of the writer, if across the room, or if near enough, by placing the hand of the writer carelessly on the shoulder of the party we desired to communicate with, the communication was written out in the telegraph alphabet or by taking hold of his hand ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... was a master and there was a maid. We will call the master by the first letter of the alphabet—Mr. A. And we will call the maid ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... has baffled the ingenuity of every one of their collectors. Our Ray, after long premeditation, has chosen a system with the appearance of an alphabetical order; but, as it turns out, his system is no system, and his alphabet is no alphabet. After ten years' labour, the good man could only arrange his proverbs by commonplaces—by complete sentences—by phrases or forms of speech—by proverbial similes—and so on. All these are pursued in alphabetical order, "by the first letter of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... day, far among the hills to the south, a twinkling light. From the regularity with which it shone and disappeared, he came to the conclusion that it was caused by signallers endeavouring to open communications. The flashes were watched, and were found to be in accordance with the Morse alphabet; and the joyful news was spread that their ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... syllables of sound in unmeaning rotation, and you despise its words, its purposes, its narrative feats; carry out your principle, it will show you where you are. Buy a dirty palette for a picture, and dream the alphabet is a poem." ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... aloud from the Bible, his curiosity was aroused. He felt so secure in her kindness that he had the boldness to ask her to teach him. Following her natural impulse to do kindness to others, and without, for a moment, thinking of the danger, she at once consented. He quickly learned the alphabet and in a short time could spell words of three syllables. But alas, for his young ambition! When Mr. Auld discovered what his wife had done, he was both surprised and pained. He at once stopped the perilous practice, but it was ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... Men are Berbers, but their alphabet is composed of Lybian characters, and these are closely related to the signs engraved on certain vases of the Nile valley that are probably six thousand years old. Moreover, among the rock-cut images of the African desert ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... and looked out across the wintry woods. They have a different expression now; they have gone gray and bedraggled, and the midday sun has thawed down the snow and diminished it. There are catkins everywhere, drifts of them in the underbrush, looking like letters of the alphabet piled in a heap. The moon rises, the stars break forth. I am cold and shiver a little, but I have nothing to do in the hut, and prefer to shiver as long as possible. In the winter I did nothing so foolish, but went ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... him. But her little hand lay unreprovingly in his,—nestling like a timid bird which loved to be there, and sought not to escape. He pressed it gently to his heart; he felt by its magnetic touch, by that dumb alphabet of love, more eloquent than spoken words, that he had won the heart of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... edification or instruction. Science in the hands of the clergy must needs be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be found in stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings in the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the game of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. The earliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... that was eccentric, and by no means a miser of my eccentricities; every one was welcome to a share of them, and I had plenty to spare after having freighted the company. Some sweetmeats easily bribed me home with him. I learned from poor Boyse my alphabet and my grammar, and the rudiments of the classics. He taught me all he could, and then sent me to the school at Middleton. In short, he made a man of me. I recollect it was about five and thirty years afterwards, when I had risen to some eminence at the bar, and when I had a seat in ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... laden with the wisdom of the law, to write tales such as this of mine, how charmingly might not thy characters have come forth upon the canvas—how much more charmingly than I can limn them! While, on the other hand, ignorant as thou now tellest me that I am of the very alphabet of the courts, had thy wig been allotted to me, I might have gathered guineas thick as daisies in summer, while to thee perhaps they come no faster than snow-drops in the early spring. It is all in our destiny. ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... French and Greek when he was ten year old, And knew the Spanish alphabet as soon as he was told. He never, never thought of play until his work was done, He labored hard from break of day until the set of sun. He never scraped his muddy shoes upon the parlor floor, And never answered, back his ma, and never banged the door. "But, truly, I could never ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... the transliteration of Arabic words I deliberately reject the artful and complicated system, ugly and clumsy withal, affected by scientific modern Orientalists. Nor is my sympathy with their prime object, namely to fit the Roman alphabet for supplanting all others. Those who learn languages, and many do so, by the eye as well as by the ear, well know the advantages of a special character to distinguish, for instance, Syriac from Arabic, Gujrati from Marathi. Again ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... "The alphabet belongs equally to the whole human race; no one can deny that. I have taken eight letters and combined them in such a way as to produce the word Seingalt. It pleased me, and I have adopted it as my surname, being firmly persuaded that as no one had borne it before no one could ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... called after him, "we'll do the Chiverses and the Dallases"; and he perceived that she was going through their two families alphabetically, and that they were only in the first quarter of the alphabet. ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... nights correspondingly cool. We have a good deal of wind. I wrote a letter to Drs. Overweg and Barth jointly, calling upon them to assist me in case the Sfaxee would not wait for his money until the return of the courier. Dr. Overweg consents. I wrote out the Tuarick alphabet. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... because there is any similarity between the sound and the animal designated, but because we have agreed that that sound shall represent that object. So, also, we have agreed that the characters h-o-r-s-e shall represent the same thing; and by the use of twenty-six characters, called the alphabet, placed together in various combinations, we are able to write our entire ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... in vain had he mastered the encyclopedia from Safety-lamps to Stranglers. He could explain with strange words and in long, balanced sentences everything about the British army that began with an S, except only those things whose second letter stood farther down in the alphabet than T. But the elements of knowledge kept dropping in, at first on perfunctory calls, visitors that disappeared when you turned to speak with them, but that later came to stay. The four young men were like children ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... which had been folded and sealed without an envelope, after the fashion of our great-grandfathers. On it was pasted a strip of the tape used in electric-recording instruments, and the characters were those of the Morse alphabet, rather an unusual sight nowadays, when receiving messages by sound is the universal practice. Underneath the row of dots and dashes had been written their English equivalents in Indiman's small, close handwriting. The transcribed ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... severe examination. It was found that he could perform with wonderful agility numerous gymnastic feats, such as jumping backward and forward, walking and vaulting upon his hinder legs, and keeping time to certain tunes. He could also distinguish between certain figures and letters of the alphabet, to the latter of which he would, when directed, point with his nose. Like some of our New York politicians, the pig was a wondrous animal in various ways. In fine, so extraordinary was his talent, that, as I have before said, the major resolved at once to proceed with him ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... act the part of sensible parents toward our little boy. He never stepped inside of a school-house until he was seven years old, and, when he did so, it was to stay only a brief while. It was six months before he became acquainted with every letter of the alphabet, and no youngster of his years ever ruined more clothing than he. The destruction of shoes, hats, and trousers was enough to bankrupt many a father, and it often provoked a protest from his mother. ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... began teaching me the alphabet, when I was thirteen years old. I had no mother and no home or friend, other than Judge S——, in whose family ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... Zubrah, Sarfah, 'Aww, Simk, Ghafar, Zubn, Ikll, Kalb, Shaulah, Na'am, Baldah, Sa'ad al-Zbih, Sa'ad al-Bul'a, Sa'ad al-Su'd, Sa'ad al-Akhbiyah, Fargh the Former and Fargh the Latter; and Risha. They are disposed in the order of the letters of the Abjad-hawwaz or older alphabet,[FN420] according to their numerical power, and in them are secret virtues which none knoweth save Allah (extolled and exalted be He!) and the stablished in science. They are divided among the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, two Mansions and a third of a Mansion to each Sign. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... grow up a nidiot," said she, drawing her mouth down as she had seen Prudy do when beseeching her to learn the alphabet. "Don't he know ...
— Little Prudy's Dotty Dimple • Sophie May
... of mankind treats largely of these gods, for it is an interesting fact that in the history of any civilized people, the evolution of psychotheism is approximately synchronous with the invention of an alphabet. In the earliest writings of the Egyptians, the Hindoos, and the Greeks, this stage is discovered, and Osiris, Indra, and Zeus are characteristic representatives. As psychotheism and written language appear together in the evolution of culture, this stage of theism is consciously or unconsciously ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... she held out her hand. He smiled and took it, and, as it lay in his, looked at it for a moment musingly. She drew it back slowly. He was then thinking that it was the most intelligent hand he had ever seen. . . . He determined to play a bold and surprising game. He had learned from her the alphabet of the fingers—that is, how to spell words. He knew little gesture-language. He, therefore, spelled slowly: "Hawley is angry, because you love Hilton." The statement was so matter-of-fact, so sudden, that the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... example—does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to be a picture of a piece of music, nor our phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a picture of our speech. And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... though I am unwilling to deny, that 'tis difficult for a man to be an Accomplisht Naturalist, that is a stranger to Chymistry, yet I look upon the common Operations and practices of Chymists, almost as I do on the Letters of the Alphabet, without whose knowledge 'tis very hard for a man to become a Philosopher; and yet that knowledge is very far from being sufficient ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... next day the cripple came to the sick man, and received his first lesson; and every day, at an appointed hour, he was in Mr. Croft's room, eager for the instruction he received. Quickly he mastered the alphabet, and as quickly learned to construct small words, preparatory to combining them ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... besides, I was born in that and learned all its ups and downs and passages and corners when I was a child, just as I learned the alphabet. But this house! It is as full of devious ways and pitfalls as the way in 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and I would never learn it any more than I could the multiplication table. Why, that second-floor suite you have given me is ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... Kadmos—the founder of Thebes in Boeotia. According to tradition, he came from Phoenicia and brought the alphabet to the Greeks and the knowledge of working ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... Lady Janet's visit) was, of course, discovered in a touching domestic position! She had a foundling baby asleep on her lap; and she was teaching the alphabet to an ugly little vagabond girl whose acquaintance she had first made in the street. Just the sort of artful tableau vivant to impose on ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... Speaker, which gets quite excited, T is the Temper, it shows uninvited. U the Unquestioning Faith of the some, V is the Vaudeville, where they all come. W stands for the Worshipping Few, X their Xtreme disproportionate view. Y ends Ibsenity, and, as everyone knows, Z brings an alphabet rhyme to a close. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... better than I had expected, for though I thought her looks very terrible at first—and she was certainly firm—she was really kind and gentle. Under her instruction I gained the first knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, of which I was before profoundly ignorant. Of course she was very gentle with Ellen, as everybody was, and Fanny seemed to be very fond of her. She was courageous, too, as I before long had evidence. I remember one night being suddenly lifted in her arms, ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... bedroom, with the occasional use of a parlour, ever appear to come to terms with these other people who live in a rural situation remarkable for its bracing atmosphere, within five minutes' walk of the Royal Exchange. Even those letters of the alphabet who are always running away from their friends and being entreated at the tops of columns to come back, never DO come back, if we may judge from the number of times they are asked to do it and don't. It really seems,' said Tom, relinquishing the paper with a thoughtful sigh, 'as if people had ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... as European children so far as they have been tried, but they have not been put to abstract reasoning. Their perceptive powers are large, as they are much exercised in procuring food, etc. Anything requiring perception only is readily mastered, the alphabet will be known in a few lessons; figures are soon recognised, and the quantities they represent, but addition from figures alone always presents difficulties for a while, but in a little time, however, it ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... the door. "I must have lots of moonlight and several stormy sunsets, and the wind soughing in the branches. I shall have to buy a new dictionary,—a big, fat, heavy one with the flags of all nations and how to measure the contents of an empty hogshead, and the deaf and dumb alphabet, and everything but the word you want to know the meaning of and whether it begins with ph or ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... that he had consecrated his own Church of St. Peter, Westminster. When the king and Bishop Mellitus arrived next day, Edric told his story, and pointed out the marks of the twelve crosses on the church, the walls within and without moistened with holy water, the letters of the Greek alphabet written twice over distinctly on the sand, the traces of the oil, and even the droppings of the angelic candles. The bishop could not presume to add any further ceremonial, ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... it is not a common name, and I cannot speak to it at this moment. But if it is here, I'll wager I'll find it for you. D'you see, I have them here in alphabet order,' he continued, bustling with an important air to a cupboard in the wall, whence he produced a thick folio bound in roughened calf. 'Ay, here's Fishwick, in the burial book, do you see, volume two, page seventeen, anno domini 1750, seventeen years gone, that is. Will you see it? 'Twill ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... smart. I can write, though, better'n some of the boys up at school. I saw lots of names on the shed door. See here now," and scrambling down, Ben pulled out a cherished bit of chalk and flourished off ten letters of the alphabet, one on each of the dark stone ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... father died of injuries received in rescuing a person from drowning. At the age of 10 years Andrew was apprenticed to a tailor. His early education was almost entirely neglected, and, notwithstanding his natural craving to learn, he never spent a day in school. Was taught the alphabet by a fellow-workman, borrowed a book, and learned to read. In 1824 removed to Laurens Court-House, S.C., where he worked as a journeyman tailor. In May, 1826, returned to Raleigh, and in September, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... the light of each succeeding age, First learned his letters from a female sage. But thus far taught—the alphabet once learn'd— To loftier use those elements he turn'd. Forced th' unconscious signs, by process rare, Known quantities with unknown to compare; And, by their aid, profound deductions drew From depths of truth his teacher never ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... Daniel, which their fellow-disciples, the Anabaptists, had some time before condemned and derided. How much greater was the modesty of Augustine (De doct. Christ. lib. 2, c. 8.), who, in making his catalogue of the Sacred Books, did not take for his rule the Hebrew Alphabet, like the Jews, nor private judgment, like the Sectaries, but that Spirit wherewith Christ animates the whole Church. The Church, the guardian of this treasure, not its mistress (as heretics falsely make out), vindicated publicly in former times by very ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... very far away—so far, that I have covenanted with myself to learn the alphabet of music. Tom Bodkin had promised to present me with a musical instrument called a dulcimer—I persist in thinking that this is a species of guitar, although I am assured that it is a number of small metal ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... you," said I. "If you should chance to put me down, I will do penance by teaching you the Armenian alphabet—the very word alphabet, as you will perceive, shows us that our letters came from Greece. If, on the other hand, I should chance to put you down, you will give me ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... knees. By his side was his wife, my dear adopted mother, occupied with her sewing; and near them, on a stool, sat Angela, the wife of Agricola, nursing her last-born child, while the gentle Magdalen, with the eldest boy in her lap, was occupied in teaching him the letters of the alphabet. Agricola had just returned from the fields, and was beginning to unyoke his cattle, when, struck, like me, no doubt, with this picture, he stood gazing on it for a moment, with his hand still leaning on the yoke, beneath which bent ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... not forgotten to bring a reading book, and now put Hephzibah through the alphabet, which she seemed to know perfectly, calling each letter by its right name. Daisy then asked if she could read words; and getting an assenting nod again, she tried her in that. But here Hephzibah's education was defective; she could read indeed, after ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... tens of thousands on the exposed planes of its sea-washed strata, standing out in bold relief, like sculpturings on ancient tombstones, at once mummies and monuments,—the dead and the carved memorials of the dead. Every rock is a tablet of hieroglyphics, with an ascertained alphabet; every rolled pebble a casket with old pictorial records locked up within. Trap-dykes, beyond comparison finer than those of the Water of Leith, which first suggested to Hutton his theory, stand up like fences over the sedimentary strata, or run ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... like day and night; it is the first light in creation; and the first light of the primordial Elo-him—the A-dam,—male and female, or, (scientifically) Electricity and Life. Its universal value is nine, for it is the ninth letter of the alphabet and the ninth door of the fifty portals or gateways, that lead to the concealed mysteries of being.... Od is the pure ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... They raised maize, cotton, tobacco, wheat, oats, and potatoes, and traded with their products to New Orleans. They had gardens, and apple and peach orchards. They had built roads, and they kept inns for travelers. They manufactured cotton and wool.... One of their number had invented an alphabet for their language. They had a civil government, imitated from that of the United States." Under these improved conditions all of the tribes were growing in numbers and acquiring vested rights which it would be increasingly difficult to deny or ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... opening chapter, on self-confidence, and again lay its precepts to heart. Learn by rules to speak without thinking of rules. It is not—or ought not to be—necessary for you to stop to think how to say the alphabet correctly, as a matter of fact it is slightly more difficult for you to repeat Z, Y, X than it is to say X, Y, Z—habit has established the order. Just so you must master the laws of efficiency in speaking until it is a second nature for you to speak ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the art of writing. They had an alphabet of their own, which was at once simple and very scientific. There were no vowels, but only consonant sounds, the vowels being supplied in reading, just as if one should write the words fthr or dghtr, and read them father and daughter. ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... quietly. "I trust, Lieutenant Lorenzi, that you will be satisfied with an explanation to which the Burgomaster of Nuremberg offered no objection when I gave it to him in circumstances with which I need not weary the company." There was a moment of silent expectation. Casanova continued: "The alphabet is our common heritage. I chose a collocation of letters which pleased my taste, and ennobled myself without being indebted to any prince, who might perhaps have been disinclined to allow my claim. I style myself Casanova, ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... or rather the sound of A as in full, is the initial letter of the Sanskrit alphabet. Of compounds, the Dwanda, or the copulative compound, is enumerated first. In other respects again, the Dwanda is the best kind of compound for the words forming it are co-ordinate, without one being dependent ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and instructive picture lesson-book for very little folk. Beginning with an illustrated alphabet of large letters, the little reader goes forward by easy stages to word-making, reading, counting, writing, and finally to the most popular ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... genius which excogitated an alphabet; worked out the simpler problems of arithmetic; invented implements for measuring the lapse of time; conceived the idea of raising enormous structures with the poorest of all materials, clay; discovered the art of polishing, boring, and engraving gems; reproduced with truthfulness ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... enable the learner to examine, analyze and criticise his writing, the following principles are given as his standards of measurements and form. By combining them in various ways the essential part of all letters in the alphabet may be formed. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... that flourished in the same early ages of the world. The first I shall produce are the lipogrammatists or letter-droppers of antiquity, that would take an exception, without any reason, against some particular letter in the alphabet, so as not to admit it once into a whole poem. One Tryphiodorus was a great master in this kind of writing. He composed an "Odyssey" or epic poem on the adventures of Ulysses, consisting of four- and-twenty books, having entirely banished the letter A from his ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... as rare in 1812 as he is to-day. To judge from his small head and clean-cut features, fine and mobile; from his graceful carriage and slight limbs, this man was one of the many bearing names that begin with the fourth letter of the alphabet since the Terror only. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... long time this amused him, but finally tiring he continued his explorations. In a cupboard filled with books he came across one with brightly colored pictures—it was a child's illustrated alphabet— ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Christ it is not always the oldest or the cleverest who are the best scholars. There are white-haired old men who are only just learning the alphabet of Christ's religion, in the lowest place; and there are little children, so pure and white-souled, that they have already mastered some of the hardest lessons. In other schools the scholar must be naturally clever, or, at least, most industrious, ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... Greenville, the next point ahead. I saw the ugly boulders under the sloop's keel as she flashed over them, and I made a mental note of it that the letter M, for which the reef was named, was the thirteenth one in our alphabet, and that thirteen, as noted years before, was still my lucky number. The natives of Cape Greenville are notoriously bad, and I was advised to give them the go-by. Accordingly, from M Reef I steered outside ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... sounds. It recommends such forms as tho, thru, enuf, quartet, catalog, program. If the student employs these forms, he must use them consistently. Many writers oppose simplified spelling; many advocate it; many compromise. Others desire to supplant our present alphabet with one more nearly phonetic, and prefer, until this fundamental reform takes place, to preserve our present ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... sentimental it vexes, That thus on our labors stern CHRONOS should frown Should change our soft liquids to izzards and Xes, And turn true-love's alphabet all ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... eminently qualified for the post he now holds; but his literary acquirements were of a very low order, for upon becoming prime minister he could neither read nor write. Finding great inconvenience from his incapacity in these respects, he applied himself diligently to his alphabet, and was soon able to carry on all official correspondence of any importance to himself. The whole of the political, fiscal, and judicial communications are submitted to him, and the departments controlled by him, very little regard being had to the ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... that author. What took him was a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word; the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the alphabet: the romance of language. His honest head was very nearly empty, his intellect like a child's; and when he read his favourite authors, he can almost never have understood what he was reading. Yet ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them anonymous, and others from obscure individuals; some of them practical, and very many wildly fantastic. Even the grammarians showed their sympathy with the spirit of the time by proposing to expel summarily all redundant letters from the Russian alphabet! ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... he says. (His face has grown scarlet.) "Well, you must excuse me for saying that you are rather—" He breaks off and begins again, very fast this time. "My first is the first of all—is not A the first letter in the alphabet? My second has no second—has God (Dieu) any second? My whole—I cannot say it ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... we discover is that the children of to-day are taught, not new lessons, but the old lessons by a new method. Sewing, for example: little girls no longer make samplers, working on them the letters of the alphabet in "cross- stitch"; they learn to do cross-stitch letters, only they learn not by working the entire alphabet on a square of linen merely available to "learn on," but by working the initials of a mother or an aunt on a "guest ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... born his father moved to Lissoy, another and better parish. Little Oliver began to learn very early, but his first teacher thought him stupid: "Never was there such a dull boy," she said. She managed, however, to teach him the alphabet, and at six he went to the village school of Lissoy. Paddy Byrne, the master there, was an old soldier. He had fought under Marlborough, he had wandered the world seeking and finding adventures. His head was full of tales of wild exploits, of battles, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... that the average speaker has of his language is that it is built up, acoustically speaking, of a comparatively small number of distinct sounds, each of which is rather accurately provided for in the current alphabet by one letter or, in a few cases, by two or more alternative letters. As for the languages of foreigners, he generally feels that, aside from a few striking differences that cannot escape even the uncritical ear, the sounds they use are the same as ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... was occupied with Freddie. The little boy knew his alphabet, but nothing more, so that his young teacher had to begin with him at ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... needle, and emulating them with the tongue, Miss Letty stole behind Ripton's chair, and introduced between him and his book the Latin initial letter, large and illuminated, of the theme she supposed to be absorbing him, as it did herself. The unexpected vision of this accusing Captain of the Alphabet, this resplendent and haunting A. fronting him bodily, threw Ripton straight back in his chair, while Guilt, with her ancient indecision what colours to assume on detection, flew from red to white, from white to red, across his fallen chaps. Letty laughed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is but a simpler form of drawing, and we know that the letters of our alphabet were originally pictures or symbols. The main difference is that writing stops short with the acquisition of the purely useful power of forming letters and words, and is seldom pursued for the sake of its beauty or artistic qualities as formerly; while drawing continually leads ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... It implies the evolution of a highly organized man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honor, and taste. In the hesitation to define what it is, we usually suggest it by negations. A nation that has no clothing, no alphabet, no iron, no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call barbarous. And after many arts are invented or imported, as among the Turks and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Whichever current is used, it may always be known which of the two posts employed is the positive and which the negative, by observing the letters stamped upon their tops. The one whose letter comes first in the order of the alphabet is positive; the other is negative. Also, the one standing towards the left hand is positive, and that at the right hand is negative. The qualities of the several currents are stated in a descriptive paper on the inside of the lid of the machine, which ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... unintentionally left the door of his room ajar. The parlor door, too, must be open partly, or he could not have heard so plainly. What was that she was playing? Ah! Mendelssohn. Those "Songs Without Words" were as familiar to him as the alphabet. Now it is Beethoven, that beautiful work, "The Moonlight Sonata," she was evidently trying to recall her favorites to mind, for of course she could not be playing by note. Then she strayed into a "valse" by Chopin, and followed ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... wrath he followed her to the drawing-room, only to hear divinely sweet chords. The Duchess was at the piano. If the man of science or the poet can at once enjoy and comprehend, bringing his intelligence to bear upon his enjoyment without loss of delight, he is conscious that the alphabet and phraseology of music are but cunning instruments for the composer, like the wood and copper wire under the hands of the executant. For the poet and the man of science there is a music existing apart, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... against the miserable defects which he saw, or fancied he saw, in the system of the material world. That is to say, he undertook to criticise and find fault with the great volume of nature, before he had even learned its alphabet. The objections of Lucretius, which appeared so formidable in his day, as well as many others that have since been raised on equally plausible grounds, have passed away before the progress of science, and now seem like the silly prattle of children, or the insane babble of madmen. But although such ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... who did not know a letter of the alphabet, whose naturally dull minds had become more stupified by habitual vice— those men, who wus her inferiors, and her servants in every thing else, wus each one of 'em her king here, and she his slave: and they compelled her to obey ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... number three to come in. He expressed this view, somewhat after this fashion, to his mother, who looked at him as if he had been dancing a jig. He had such a fanciful, pictorial way of saying things that he might as well address her in the deaf-mute's alphabet. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... akvemetita. Ally interligi. Almanac almanako. Almighty cxiopova. Almost preskaux. Almond migdalo. Alms almozo. Almshouse maljunulejo. Aloes aloo. Aloft supre. Alone sola (adj.), sole (adv.). Along with kune kun. Aloof, to keep eviti. Aloud lauxte. Alphabet alfabeto. Alps Alpoj. Already jam. Also ankaux. Altar altaro. Alter aliigi. Alteration aliigo. Altercation malpaco. Alternate alterni. Alternative elekteco. Althea alteo. Although kvankam. Altitude alto. Alto aldo. Altogether tute. Alum aluno. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the superintendent and be quick! Charley, brace up—lively—and come and write this out!" With his wonderful electric pen, the handle several hundreds of miles long, Watkins, unknown to his interlocutor, was printing in the Morse alphabet this startling message: ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... about one-twelfth as many telephones as there are inhabitants of the United States. The influence of this development upon the lives of the people has been profound. Whether the influence has been wholly for good may not be so conclusively apparent. Lord Bacon has declared that, excepting only the alphabet and the art of printing, those inventions abridging distance are of the greatest service to mankind. If this be true, it may be said that the invention of telephony deserves high place ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... but because it is soothing. To people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in this vast and obvious manner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell. The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... not a true alphabet, but a syllabic; not letters, but syllables, are indicated by each character; 73 characters are all that are needed to express the whole language. It is so simple and stenographic that the fathers often ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... without it. And what did it signify, whether you retained them or not? In cases where you might have been foolish without peril you were wise; when nonsense and bigotry threaten you with destruction, it is impossible to bring you back to the alphabet of justice and common sense. If men are to be fools, I would rather they were fools in little matters than in great; dulness turned up with temerity is a livery all the worse for the facings; and the most tremendous of all ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... that," said I; "we are at the commencement of a philological age, every one studies languages: that is, every one who is fit for nothing else; philology being the last resource of dulness and ennui, I have got a little in advance of the throng, by mastering the Armenian alphabet; but I foresee the time when every unmarriageable miss, and desperate blockhead, will likewise have acquired the letters of Mesroub, and will know the term for bread, in Armenian, and perhaps that ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... a drop over a ferry-boat into the icy East River. There is an averted strangulation of a baby and for the second time in a Saltus opus a dying millionaire leaves his fortune to the St. Nicholas Hospital. Was Saltus ballyhooing for this institution? The hero is a modern Don Juan. Alphabet Jones appears occasionally, as he does in many of the other novels. This Balzacian trick obsessed the author for a time. The book is dedicated to John S. Rutherford and bears as a motto on its title page this quotation from Rabusson: "Pourquoi la mort? Dites, plutot, pourquoi ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the attitudes of a posture-master, vainly endeavoured to expostulate with the natives by signs and gestures. To have looked at my companion, as, sympathizing with my sufferings, he strove to put an end to them, one would have thought that he was the deaf and dumb alphabet incarnated. Whether my tormentor yielded to Toby's entreaties, or paused from sheer exhaustion, I do not know; but all at once he ceased his operations, and at the same time the chief relinquishing his hold upon me, I fell back, faint and breathless ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... sideboard, and managed a microscopic cooking stove with a skill that brought tears of pride to Hannah's eyes, while Demi learned his letters with his grandfather, who invented a new mode of teaching the alphabet by forming letters with his arms and legs, thus uniting gymnastics for head and heels. The boy early developed a mechanical genius which delighted his father and distracted his mother, for he tried to imitate every machine he ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... brackets "{}" is my transliteration of Greek text into English using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table. The diacritical marks ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... but clears the way for another. The teeth sown by the alphabet-founder, were eye-teeth, not yet all sprung from the soil. Like spring-wheat, blade by blade, they break ground late; like spring-wheat, many seeds have perished in the hard winter glebe. Oh, my lord! though we galvanize corpses ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... wagin. Some said—I b'lieve 'twar Em'ry Keen an—they could read the names on the boards plain, 'twar so light, the moon bein' nigh the full: but Em'ry never read nuthin' at night by the moon in his life; he ain't enny too capable o' wrastlin' with the alphabet with a strong daytime on his book ter light him ter knowledge. An' the shadows war black an' still, an' all the yearth looked ez ef nuthin' lived nor ever would agin, an' they hearn a wolf howl. Waal, that disaccommodated ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... to me to merely propose to substitute one inadequacy for another; a sort of patching and plugging poor old dental relics with cement and gold and porcelain paste; what was really needed was a new set of teeth. That is to say, a new ALPHABET. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... migrating bands which replenished the ranks of the Village Indians, as well as the continent, with inhabitants. It remained for the Village Indians to invent the process of smelting iron ore to attain to the Upper Status of barbarism, and, beyond that, to invent a phonetic alphabet to reach the first stage of civilization. One entire ethnical period intervened between the highest class of Indians and ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... but with Little L it was different, there an exception was made. And yet he was no less loved by the Sekundaner than by the Primaner. One could see that in class, where we Sekundaner boys, you know, were by ourselves. In class we were ranged according to alphabet, so that the two L's sat together very ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... ALPHABET. It was Athenodo'rus the Stoic who advised Augustus to repeat the alphabet when he felt inclined ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... usually accomplished. In the district mixed schools the primary pupils receive but little attention, and they are not infrequently occupied from one to three years in obtaining an imperfect knowledge of the alphabet. Usually much better results are attained by the combined agency of the home and the school, but there is an average loss of one-fourth of the time employed in teaching and learning the elements ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... while, the hanging judge, and began "St. Ives" as a short story. It was now that, early in 1893, under an attack of hemorrhage, Stevenson dictated his tale to his stepdaughter, on his fingers, in the gesture alphabet of the dumb. Perhaps this feat is as marvelous as Scott's dictating "The Bride of Lammermoor," in tormentis, to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Josephus against Apion, i. Sec. 8. Origen says that the Hebrews had twenty-two sacred books corresponding to the number of letters in their alphabet. Opera, ii. 528. It would appear from Jerome that they reckoned in the following manner: they considered the Twelve Minor Prophets only one book; First and Second Samuel, one book; First and Second Kings, one book; First and Second Chronicles, one book; Ezra ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... or pore {39} for years over arts and sciences, when a few months' practice with these pasteboard pages [takes the cards] can make any man's fortune, without his understanding a single letter of the alphabet, provided he can but slip the cards, snap his fingers, and utter the unintelligible jargon of 'presto, passa, largo, mento, cocolorum, yaw' like this Jonas. The moment he comes into company, and takes up a pack of cards, he begins, ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... myself once as intelligence officer at Delagoa Bay during the Boer War. I have a head for things like chess and puzzles, and I used to reckon myself pretty good at finding out cyphers. This one looked like the numerical kind where sets of figures correspond to the letters of the alphabet, but any fairly shrewd man can find the clue to that sort after an hour or two's work, and I didn't think Scudder would have been content with anything so easy. So I fastened on the printed words, for you can make a pretty good numerical cypher if you ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... pitied at once, as luminous but remote phantoms; the Romans, with their greater practical sense, ancient virtue, and love of law and order, seem like our own people. It is with personal pride that we read of the valour and conquests of this mighty race, who used the alphabet we use, spoke and wrote with but little difference many of the words we speak and write, and with divine creative power evolved virtually all the forms of law which govern us today. To the Greek, art and literature were inextricably involved in daily life and thought; to the Roman, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Wunderheim, a Bulgarian pianist, was playing what the programme called a sonata in X dur, by Tschaikowsky, op. 47, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. I listened: I didn't understand it all, but I was sitting next to Edith and would have endured the remainder of the alphabet rather than let Tompkins gain ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... direct ratio to the use of the letters: "E: T: A: O: N: I: S: B: M, etc." The use of "E" was double that of any other. Yet on the pages of the book he found that the most frequently recurring symbol was "R" which was, ordinarily, one of the least used in the alphabet. "T," which would have been second in popularity, naturally, was seen only a few times in proportion. "Y," also seldom used, appeared very often. The symbol "A" ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the translation of the Koran into any other tongue was a sin. 'The Nationalists,' he tells us, 'have cut themselves off from the superstitious prejudice.' A further attempt was made to substitute Turkish letters for Arabic letters in the alphabet, but this seems to have presented insuperable difficulties, and I gather that ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... my children came to Sinai, they accepted thee, and they honored thee. And now, on the day of their distress, thou standest up against them?" Hearing this, the Torah stepped aside, and did not testify. "Let the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in which Torah is written come and testify against Israel," said God. They appeared without delay, and Alef, the first letter, was about to testify against Israel, when Abraham interrupted it with the words: "Thou chief of all letters, thou comest to testify against Israel in the time of his ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... The hours which he had, each day, spent in the porter's lodge had not been wasted. The affection of the good woman had brightened his life, and he had none of the dull, downcast look so common among children in workhouses. She had encouraged him to talk and play, had taught him the alphabet, and supplied him with an occasional picture book, with easy words. Indeed, she devoted far more time to him than many mothers, in her class of life, can ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... the story undoubtedly depicts correctly, at least in a general way, the relations subsisting in the earliest epochs of civilization. A common knowledge of agriculture, like a common knowledge of the alphabet, of war chariots, of purple, and other implements and ornaments, far more frequently warrants the inference of an ancient intercourse between nations than of their original unity. But as regards the Greeks and Italians, whose mutual relations are comparatively ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the Cherokee typographical character the word has been utilized with its subtleties of signification to express spirit or angel. In this story, however, the scene of which is laid in a period long previous to the conversion of the tribe, or even the accepted date of the invention of the Cherokee alphabet, the word is used in its early and original sense to denote a magician of special and expansive gifts ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the normal teachers clustered other teachers to teach the public schools; the college trained in Greek and Latin and mathematics, 2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000 others in morals and manners, and they in turn taught thrift and the alphabet to nine millions of men, who to-day hold $300,000,000 of property. It was a miracle—the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th century, and yet to-day men smile at it, and in fine superiority tell us that it was all a strange ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... all religion, the being of God. The following fact is mentioned, not as a proof of superior sagacity in him (for I have no doubt that most children would, in like circumstances, think as he did), but merely as a moral or logical experiment. He had reached his fifth or sixth year, knew the alphabet, and could read a little; but had received no particular information with respect to the Author of his being: because I thought he could not yet understand such information; and because I had learned, ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... whom he prayed, and then he sat talking with rough men while they ate their dinners, and he read passages from the Bible to women while they washed their husbands' clothes. And for a while he sat with a little girl in his lap teaching the child her alphabet. If it were possible for him he would do his duty. He would spare himself in nothing, though he might suffer even to fainting. And on this occasion he did suffer,—almost to fainting, for as he returned ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... economy of its grammar and syntax. It needs must have two plurals, one for under ten and one for over, twenty-three conjugations, and yet be without the distinction of past and future. Which is worse even than the Hindustani alphabet with no vowels and four z's—so unnecessary, isn't it, as ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... feathers.' The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... for a minute. Dance for a minute. See how many you can count in a minute. Say the alphabet backward. Do the exact opposite of three things ordered by the company. Crow like a cock. Say "Gig whip" ten times very rapidly. Say "Mixed biscuits" ten times very rapidly. Say rapidly: "She stood on the steps ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... This is done by moving W to the right or left. If the current enters at X, it will pass along C and out at Y, when C is pressed down. By moving C up and down according to a previously arranged set of signals, messages can be sent by means of the electric current. (See telegraph alphabet.) This apparatus is not a good one where the line is to be run with a "closed circuit battery," or where it is to be used very often. It will do, however, for places where a push-button would be ...
— How Two Boys Made Their Own Electrical Apparatus • Thomas M. (Thomas Matthew) St. John
... American men intend always to keep women slaves, political and civil, they make a great mistake when they let the girl, with the boy, learn the alphabet, for no educated class will long remain in subjection. We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... at your service, Nikolai Petrovitch; but Liebig's miles over our heads! One has first to learn the a b c, and then begin to read, and we haven't set eyes on the alphabet yet.' ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... his old friend and captain from ship to ship, and at length having overcome the difficulty not only of the alphabet, but of pothooks and hangers, he obtained his warrant, and for several years had charge of one of the ships in which he had fought and bled, now laid ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... his teacher unmercifully, when, in trying to teach him the alphabet, she drew a figure on the board and told him it was A, he called out: "How do you ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... a good father; that is, he wants to spoil his children, and, in order to do this easily, he thinks fit to retain his present instructor, who is not very learned, but who takes part in their games and joyous sports with wonderful facility, who points out the letters of the alphabet to the little girl, who takes the little boys to mass, and who, no less obliging than the worthy Abbe P. of our acquaintance, would readily dance for Madame's amusement. Such a profession would not suit you, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... in crimson. Pointing to these in succession, he repeated the sounds in order. I made out that the figures in question represented the sounds spoken into the instrument, and taking out my pencil, marked under each the equivalent character of the Roman alphabet, supplemented by some letters not admitted therein but borrowed from other Aryan tongues. My host looked on with some interest whilst I did this, and bent his head as if in approval. Here then was the alphabet ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... facts in question are numbers or lines or special branches of science, such as physics, zoology, botany, anatomy, or corrupt passages in ancient authors, or undecipherable inscriptions, written, it may be, in some unknown alphabet, or obscure points in history; the kind of fame that may be obtained by correctly manipulating such facts will not extend much beyond those who make a study of them—a small number of persons, most of whom live retired lives and are envious of others who become ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Koster) of Haarlem. The book said that he went on a picnic with his family, and while idly carving his name on the trunk of a beech tree he conceived the idea that he might in the same way make individual letters of the alphabet on wooden blocks, ink them ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... with the deity of the winds is also seen in Aryan mythology. Hermes, to the Greek, was the inventor of the alphabet, music, the cultivation of the olive, weights and measures, and such humane arts. He was also the messenger of the gods, in other words, the breezes, the winds, the air in motion. His name Hermes, Hermeias, is but a transliteration ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... H. F. say about them?" asked the Pen. "He ought to know the alphabet of Parliamentary portraiture at ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... to tint and gradate tenderly with the pencil point, get a good large alphabet, and try to tint the letters into shape with the pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure their height and extreme breadth with the compasses, as a b, a c, Fig. 3, and then scratch in their ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... began to hear their alphabet. They knew it and they did not know it. What they knew was not very much. Ruster grew eager; he lifted the little boys up, each on one of his knees, and began to teach them. Liljekrona's wife went out and in and listened quite in amazement. It sounded like ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... the true descent of this people, which does not appear of terrestrial origin, but descended from some of the inhabitants of the moon, because the principal language spoken there, and in the centre of Africa, is very nearly the same. Their alphabet and method of writing are pretty much the same, and show the extreme antiquity of this people, and their exalted origin. I here give you a specimen of their writing [Vide Otrckocsus de Orig. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... editor of the 'Patriot,' is a phonographer. He took down the close of the stranger's address, and next day brought it to me written out in the ordinary alphabet. Let me read it to you. As you are acquainted with several modern languages, perhaps you can give me a key to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... rise from the banks of rivers, and rejoice with one another in new-found pasture. But the figures into which the flights were shaped were of a more special sort, being mystical compositions of letters of the alphabet, now a D, now an I, now an L, and so on, till the poet observed that they completed the whole text of Scripture, which says, Diligite justitiam, qui judicatis terram—(Love righteousness, ye that be judges of the earth). The ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... property of descending, but stops far short of him. She would die before she would reach him: he dwells below her fall. I would hate him, if I did not despise him. It is not WHAT he is, but WHERE he is, that puts my thoughts into action. The alphabet which writes the name of Thersites, blackguard, squalidity, refuses her letters for him. That mind which thinks on what it cannot express, can scarcely think on him. An hyperbole for MEANNESS would ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... young folks begun ter look behind em' fur the wagin. Some said—I b'lieve 'twar Em'ry Keen an—they could read the names on the boards plain, 'twar so light, the moon bein' nigh the full: but Em'ry never read nuthin' at night by the moon in his life; he ain't enny too capable o' wrastlin' with the alphabet with a strong daytime on his book ter light him ter knowledge. An' the shadows war black an' still, an' all the yearth looked ez ef nuthin' lived nor ever would agin, an' they hearn a wolf howl. Waal, that disaccommodated the gals mightily, an' ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... May we are a maiden castle no longer. Black coats and hats ring at the bell, and pass in and out of the different apartments. The hall table is sprinkled with letters, visiting-cards, and programmes which seem to have had the alphabet shaken out upon them, for they bear the names of professors, doctors, reverends, and very reverends, and fairly bristle with A.M.'s, M.A.'s, A.B.'s, D.D.'s, and LL.D.'s. The voice of family prayer is lifted up from the dining-room floor, ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... first followers wreathed his life in legend, that therefore you can escape from Jesus of Nazareth, you can put him aside as though he had never been? Folly! Do what you will, you cannot escape him. His life and death underlie our institutions as the alphabet underlies our literature. Just as the lives of Buddha and of Mohammed are wrought ineffaceably into the civilisation of Africa and Asia, so the life of Jesus is wrought ineffaceably into the higher civilisation, the nobler social conceptions of Europe. It is wrought into your being and into ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a seventh, named Alphabet Precis. Mr. Precis' peculiar forte was a singular happiness in official phraseology. Much that he wrote would doubtless have been considered in the purlieus of Paternoster Row as ungrammatical, if not unintelligible; ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... quiet, unchildlike life. Aunt Jane tried to teach her to read and write, but, whether from the teacher's inability to impart knowledge, or from some strange lack in the child's odd brain, Lib never learned the lesson. She could not read a word, she did not even know her alphabet. I cannot explain to myself or to you the one gift which gave her her homely village name. She told stories. I listened to many of them, and I took down from her lips several of these. They are, as you will see if you read them, "kind o' fables," as the country folk said. They were all simple little ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... system little is known beyond the fact that the letters of the alphabet were used to represent pitches. This method was probably accurate enough, but it was cumbersome, and did not afford any means of writing "measured music" nor did it give the eye any opportunity of grasping the general outline of the melody in its progression upward and ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... authors to put feigned names to their works, as if, like bastards of their brain, they were afraid to own them. Thus one styles himself Telemachus, another Stelenus, a third Polycrates, another Thrasyma-chus, and so on. By the same liberty we may ransack the whole alphabet, and jumble together any letters that come next to hand. It is farther very pleasant when these coxcombs employ their pens in writing congratulatory episdes, poems, and panegyricks, upon each other, wherein one shall be complimented ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... the toga below the knee, but the men above. And both sexes are instructed in all the arts together. When this has been done as a start, and before their third year, the boys learn the language and the alphabet on the walls by walking round them. They have four leaders, and four elders, the first to direct them, the second to teach them, and these are men approved beyond all others. After some time they exercise themselves with gymnastics, running, quoits, and other games, by means of which all ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... them together again. Then, when this word was quite learnt, she taught him the names of other things which he knew—all in three letters—and last of all showed him how to make the letters on his fingers, teaching him what is called the deaf and dumb alphabet. ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... of a spiral iron staircase. We ascended this, and found ourselves on the ground floor of the criminal side of the prison. Four wings radiated from a common centre, distinguished by the first four letters of the alphabet. I was taken to the first cell in the first wing, Mr. Ramsey to the second cell in the second wing, and Mr. Kemp to the second cell in the third wing; our numbers being A 2, 1—B 2, 2—and C 2, 2. Colonel Milman personally placed me in charge of a warder who has since ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... makes a different spectrum with lines in different places and of different widths. These have been memorized by chemists, so that when an expert having a spectroscope sees anything burn he can tell what it is as well as read a printed page. Men have learned the alphabet of the universe, and can read in all things radiating light, the constituent elements. The black lines in the solar spectrum are there because in the atmosphere of the sun exist vapors of metals, and the light ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... doubt of the Dewey's serious dilemma. No spoken word was necessary to impress upon the men the critical situation. Sleep was out of the question. Jack rambled into the wireless room, where he tried to calm his restless spirits by rattling away on the key at the code alphabet. Lately he had been giving much attention to mastering the operation of the wireless apparatus and under the direction of Sammy Smith had been making ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... to have never attended school or been privately taught in her life. And she can't write or even form the letters of the alphabet, but she gave her interviewer a very convincing demonstration of her ability to read. When asked how she mastered the art of reading, she replied: "The Lord ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... was not one of them, or he would not or could not speak it. For at times she rejected the professional dictum of the doctor that the faculty of memory was wholly paralyzed or held in abeyance, even to the half-automatic recollection of his letters, yet she inconsistently began to teach him the alphabet with the same method, and—in her sublime unconsciousness of his manhood—with the same discipline as if he were a very child. When he had recovered sufficiently to leave his room, she would lead him to the porch before her window, and make him contented and happy by allowing him to watch ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... very much, and soon flung his Latin words at his little sister in perfect broadsides. Then he found that Ben had somehow picked up a good deal of Latin, and knew all the Greek alphabet; and instead of laughing at Charles Reed, as a Miss Nancy, he became quite ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... been in use. Since then the matter has been much discussed. Caves used in ancient times as habitations or sepulchres and old shrines occasionally offer evidence in the form of symbols which, since they bear some resemblance to the letters of the Korean alphabet (onmuri), have been imagined to be at once the origin of the latter and the script of the Kami-no-yo (Age of the Kami). But such fancies are no longer seriously entertained. It is agreed that the so-called "letters" ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... world of dim sensation, play is all in all. "Making believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scene, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book. Will you kindly question your memory, and find out how much you did, work or pleasure, in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... these we may add the bird, which denotes a cycle of time (in Coptic phanech), and about which such wild fables were received by the credulity of Herodotus and by that of the Fathers. But the greater part of the hieroglyphics are phonetic like our alphabet, and are being slowly and precariously deciphered into the words of a language which is identified with the ancient ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... country's enormous output of Brick, Cheddar and Swiss. To attempt to classify and describe all of these would be impossible, so we will content ourselves by picking a few of the cold and hot, the plain and the fancy, the familiar and the exotic. Let's use the alphabet to sum up ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... he went into their playroom, scattered with bright toys, with alphabet blocks and an engine, a train of cars and some lengths of track, and a wooden steamboat on wheels gaily painted. Already these things had a look of indifferent treatment, of having been half cast aside. Gregory ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... were, in their rage for "utilitarianism," encumbering him. Nor were some of the correspondents of this body much more solid in their speculations than themselves; one intelligent gentleman having suggested, as a means of conferring signal advantages on the cause, an alteration of the Greek alphabet. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... read what is on the right side of the doorway: "Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for civilization." That was Macaulay, the great essayist and historian of England. I wish I had known he said that, for last month we debated in our literary society the question: "Resolved. ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... foreign origin—Greek or Ph[oe]nician. This nothing but the most inconsiderate and uncritical patriotism can deny. Denied, however, it has been; and the indigenous and independent evolution of an alphabet has been claimed; the particular tribe to which it has more especially been ascribed being the Turdetani. These—and the passage I am about to quote is the passage of Strabo just alluded to—are "put forward as the wisest of the Iberi, and ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... books." But savage life seems more injurious to the organs of vision than even the type of a cheap edition; for the most vigorous barbarians—on the prairies, in Southern archipelagos, on African deserts—suffer more from different forms of ophthalmia than from any other disease; without knowing the alphabet, they have worse eyes than if they were professors, and have not even the melancholy ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... the theorem respecting capital, discussed in the argument that "demand for commodities is not demand for labor," needs some simplification. For this purpose represent by the letters of the alphabet, A, B, C, ... X, Y, Z, the different kinds of commodities produced in the world which are exchanged against each other in the process of reaching the consumers. This exchange of commodities for each other, it need hardly be said, does not increase the number or quantity of commodities already in ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... brother is a rival. No one trusts his neighbour, because there is no faith in any man. Jealousy of their wives, and dread of espionage, destroy brotherly love and friendship. The child brought up by his slave-mother—never experiencing a father's caress, and afterwards estranged by the Arabian alphabet, (education,) hides his feelings in his own heart even from his companions; from his childhood, thinks only for himself; from the first beard are every door, every heart shut for him: husbands look askance at him, women fly from him as from a wild beast, and the first and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... three times for yes, once for no, and twice for doubtful. It is obvious that considerable conversation can be carried on by such a code, and where it is inadequate, as, for instance, in obtaining proper names, it is usual to propose to repeat the alphabet slowly, asking the intelligence to rap once when the proper letter is reached. This simple method was entirely unknown to Father H——. He had done nothing but throw holy water about his rooms, and repeat the prayer Visita quaesumus, which ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... the geometrician, 'must understand the scientific meaning of that figure. The Selenites, do they exist, will respond by a similar figure; and, a communication being thus once established, it will be easy to form an alphabet which shall enable us to converse with the inhabitants of the moon.' So spoke the German geometrician; but his project was never put into practice, and up to the present day there is no bond in existence between the Earth and her satellite. It is reserved ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... is accomplished by "mouthing" the sounds from the larynx. The distinct sounds, or words, are usually complex in nature, being made up of two or more elementary sounds. These are classed either as vowels or consonants and are represented by the different letters of the alphabet. The vowel sounds are made with the mouth open and are more nearly the pure vibrations of the vocal cords. The consonants are modifications of the vocal cord vibrations produced by the tongue, teeth, lips, ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... must turn your ill luck in love to advantage: and those from whom it comes are the two beautiful Ortlieb Es, as Nuremberg folk call the ladies Els and Eva. That makes the two. But E is the fifth letter in the alphabet, so I should choose the five. If Biberli did not ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... relationship between the picture and the idea for which it is used is in this case through the sound of the name of the object depicted. That the early alphabets are of this type of rebus pictures appears in their names. The first three letters of the Hebrew alphabet, for example, are named, respectively, aleph which means ox, beth which means house, and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... recovered Henry lay down to influenza on his own account. He is but just better and it looks as though Fanny were about to bring up the rear. As for me, I am all right, though I was reduced to dictating Anne in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, which I think you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of that colony; to learn the language, and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore, we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world; and think we know already, how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel attenuated into their meagre essences, and have given the hand of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... often arises in the Bible from our mistaking one letter for another similar one. (97) The Hebrews divide the letters of the alphabet into five classes, according to the five organs of the month employed in pronouncing them, namely, the lips, the tongue, the teeth, the palate, and the throat. (98) For instance, Alpha, Ghet, Hgain, He, are called gutturals, and are barely distinguishable, ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... strip of wood about an inch wide, and extending along the whole breadth of the cabinet, was inlaid a fine pattern in gold wire. This at first sight seemed to consist of a legend or motto. On looking closer, however, though the pattern still looked as if it was formed out of characters of the alphabet curiously entwined together, you found yourself unable to fix upon any definite word, or even letter. You looked again and again, and the longer that you looked the more certain became your belief that ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... his name upon its books, nor had he even graduated in his own country. But he had taken a very high degree indeed at Heidelberg, which had won him considerable respect among those who knew anything about such matters, and his diplomas included half the letters of the alphabet, and were undeniable. And so when he had suddenly appeared in London on the death of his uncle and cousin, a middle-aged, distinguished gentleman, with manners a little foreign, but in their way perfect, society had voted him a great improvement on the former baronet, ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... au fond de quelque armoire Ce vieil alphabet tout jauni, Ma premire leon d'histoire, Mon premier ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... meal always begins with a side-table of hors d'oeuvres, called "zakouska." That may not be spelled right, but no Russian would correct me, because the language is phonetic, and they spell the same word in many different ways. Their alphabet has thirty-eight letters in it, besides the little marks to tell you whether to make a letter ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... arose was this. One of the Scott girls wanted me to teach her Bengali. When taking her through the alphabet I expressed my pride that Bengali spelling has a conscience, and does not delight in overstepping rules at every step. I made clear to her how laughable would have been the waywardness of English spelling but for the tragic compulsion we were under to cram it ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... The Hawaiian alphabet had no letter s. The Hawaiians indicated the plural by prefixing ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... there to—shall I say to take the edge off me?—but cared not a jot to meet me in his absence. The latter circumstance is simply and conventionally explained (and, after all, these conventional expressions are no more arbitrary than the alphabet, which is admitted to be a useful means of communicating our ideas) by saying that Elsa was falling in love with Varvilliers; my own state of mind would deserve analysis, but for a haunting notion that no states of mind are worth such trouble. Let us leave it; there ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... B. C. — a prayer to the Virgin, in twenty three verses, beginning with the letters of the alphabet in their order — is said to have been written "at the request of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, as a prayer for her private use, being a woman in her religion very devout." It was first printed in ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Crusoe could speak! He spoke by means of the dog's dumb alphabet in a way that defies description. He conversed, so to speak, with his extremities—his head and his tail. But his eyes, his soft brown eyes, were the chief medium of communication. If ever the language of the eyes was carried to perfection, it was exhibited in the person of Crusoe. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... ancient Naharaina, the plains of Cilicia, the basin of the Orontes, and the country round Damascus; but the true home of the Aramaeans was in Syria rather than in the districts of the Lower Euphrates. Even in the time of the Sargonids their alphabet had made so much headway that at Nineveh itself and at Calah it had come into everyday use; when Chaldaean supremacy gave way to that of the Persians, its triumph—in the western provinces, at any rate—was complete, and it became the recognised vehicle of the royal decrees: ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... letters and pronounce the words. They read rapidly; and you should see them blush, poor little things, when they make a mistake. And they write, too, without ink. They write on a thick and hard sort of paper with a metal bodkin, which makes a great many little hollows, grouped according to a special alphabet; these little punctures stand out in relief on the other side of the paper, so that by turning the paper over and drawing their fingers across these projections, they can read what they have written, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... The alphabet of the organization is so short and simple, that I will risk fatiguing your attention by repeating it, according to the plan I have ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... languages, because as yet, nobody speaks them, and with the possible exception of that tramp poet, Homer, who passed through here last week on his way West, nobody is using it in literature. Teach him the three Rs and all will be well. Taking the alphabet first and learning one letter a year for twenty-six years he will be able to read and write as early in life as he ought to. If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... boundaries of the Ghegs and Tosks, who understand each other with dilficulty; the Albanians in Greece and Italy have also separate dialects. In writing Albanian the Latin character is employed by the Ghegs, the Greek by the Tosks; neither alphabet sufiices to represent the manifold sounds of the language, and various supplementary letters or distinguishing signs are necessary. In the use of these no uniform system has yet been adopted. An alphabet of fifty-two letters, some presenting ancient Phoenician and Cretan forms, was found by ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... number of ciphers," Allen explained, when several copies had been made of the original. "The simplest is to change the letters of the alphabet about, using Z for A, and so on. Another simple one is to make figures stand for letters, as No. 1 is A, and so on. But those are so simple that only a schoolboy ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... own idea of morning, for instance, was that period of the day when the bad taste in the mouth so natural to a gentleman is removed by a stiff toddy, drunk just before prayers. He would, no doubt, have conceded to the inventor of the alphabet a higher place among men than that of the discoverer of the mint julep, had the matter been presented to him in concrete form; but would have qualified the admission by adding, with a seriousness incompatible ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Arabic words I deliberately reject the artful and complicated system, ugly and clumsy withal, affected by scientific modern Orientalists. Nor is my sympathy with their prime object, namely to fit the Roman alphabet for supplanting all others. Those who learn languages, and many do so, by the eye as well as by the ear, well know the advantages of a special character to distinguish, for instance, Syriac from Arabic, Gujrati from Marathi. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and call the superintendent and be quick! Charley, brace up—lively—and come and write this out!" With his wonderful electric pen, the handle several hundred of miles long, Watkins, unknown to his interlocutor, was printing in the Morse alphabet this startling message: ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... whose souls their stupidity bears most heavily. But stay—they do not oppress all women alike! There are women whose spiritual needs never soar above the alphabet. When these men are men of family, and one expects to find their wives sitting with clinched hands and set teeth, simply enduring life and praying for death, one is often surprised to see that they are generally stout women, who wear many diamonds and a bovine expression in ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... hard to find what were the combinations of characters that stood for these words in the Egyptian. The letters p, t, and l were in both names. The hieroglyphic signs found in both names must be these three letters. That beginning gave all the other signs in both words, and the rest of the alphabet soon followed. Justly great is the fame of the Frenchman Champollion, who has the honor of having first deciphered and read this lost language, and opened to us the secret treasures of its history ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... for the difficulty of drawing them, which takes time and patience, I would almost say that they are more suitable than the Latin alphabet. The ancient Egyptian had our vowels; our o, which is only final and is not like that of the Spanish, which is a vowel between o and u. Like us, the Egyptians lacked the true sound of e, and in their language are found our ha and kha, which we do not ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... to do anything wisely I must begin with God. That is the very alphabet of the matter. Every other beginning is a perverse beginning, and it will end in sure disaster. "I am Alpha." Everything must take its rise in Him, or it will plunge from folly into ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... time I should write the work instead; upon the Sacondaga hills, he said, we saw and read the heavens without Old-World dust in our eyes, and our book that was to be should teach the European moles the very alphabet of planets. Alas! I also was too indolent—truly, not figuratively; the book ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... Dionysius, after the conquest of India (I refer to the semi-historical and not to the mythological Bacchus) is supposed to have gone to other and unknown countries. I imagine that those unknown countries were America. Pan, who accompanied Bacchus on his journey, taught those new men the alphabet. All this is related to the tradition of the arrival of bearded men, strangely dressed, in the American countries.... These traditions exist in the South ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... of interest in the city is the Royal Mausoleum, where are the bodies of many of the royalty of the Hawaiian dynasties. The Hawaiian alphabet consists of but twelve letters, and the preponderance of vowels in many words seems remarkable to an English-speaking person. For example one of the bodies in the Royal Mausoleum is that of "Kaiminaauao, sister of Queen Kalakaua"; it will be noticed that eight of the eleven ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... ever to this hour did, "find true within them" any sort of necessary connection between the signs, c, a, t—d, o, g—and the sounds cat, dog, or any other sounds represented by any other letters of the alphabet. Faith in the word of their teachers is absolutely the sole foundation and only source of their ability to read and write. On "the word of another, and as his second, be he who he may," every one of them has accepted every intelligible ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... took out his depilator, and ran it quickly over his face. Then, from his assortment of bottles, he began picking over his morning dosage. Vitamins, of course; got to keep plenty of vitamins in the system, or it goes all to pot on you. A, B1, B2, B12, C, ... and on down the alphabet and past it to A-G. All-purpose mineral capsules, presumably containing every element useful to the human body and possibly a couple that weren't. Two APC capsules. (Aspirin-Phenacetin-Caffeine. He liked the way those words sounded; very medicinal.) A milk-of-magnesia ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... rather the sound of A as in full, is the initial letter of the Sanskrit alphabet. Of compounds, the Dwanda, or the copulative compound, is enumerated first. In other respects again, the Dwanda is the best kind of compound for the words forming it are co-ordinate, without one being dependent ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... mastered the alphabet. His task was, of course, soon done, and he was permitted to betake himself to the nursery or elsewhere, with his mammy to take care of him; or if he chose to submit to the restraint of the school-room rather than leave mamma and the others, he ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... thought seems such a commonplace to-day that it is difficult to realize how startling it appeared half a century ago. A generation trained, as ours has been, in the doctrines of the conservation and dissipation of energy as the very alphabet of physical science can but ill appreciate the mental attitude of a generation which for the most part had not even thought it problematical whether the sun could continue to give out heat and light forever. But those advance thinkers who had ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... edifices at Persepolis, one of the capitols of the Old Persian or, as it is also called, the Achaemenian empire. By the year 1840 the decipherment of these Achaemenian inscriptions was practically complete, the inscriptions had been read, the alphabet was definitely settled, and the grammar, in all but minor points, known. It was possible, therefore, in approaching the Mesopotamian style of cuneiform, which, as occupying the third place, may be designated as No. 3, to use No. 1 as a guide, since it was only legitimate to conclude that ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... been to school, and so she didn't even know the alphabet; but Genevieve sat down patiently to teach her, and found truly that much patience was necessary to accomplish the work she had undertaken. Hepsa would soon grow discouraged when she found so much to learn, and saw her little teacher reading so readily; and her mother would often scold ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... to read music before she knew her alphabet. She had been so long lulled to sleep with Gretry's airs, that at the age when so many other young girls think only of hoops and dolls, she had found sufficient music in her soul for the whole of a charming opera. She was a prodigy. Had it not been for death, who came to seize her at ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... imagined all our efforts as only a part of a play, and his interest merely the interest of a looker-on." There was an indignant rasp in Roger's voice, and he looked across to his father with a protesting scowl. "He almost made me feel as if I had never learned the alphabet." ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... his hands, that humble book which alone was to be feared, which was the ever triumphant enemy that would surely overthrow the Church. Modest it was in its cheap "get up" as a school manual, but that did not matter: danger began with the very alphabet, increased as knowledge was acquired, and burst forth with those resumes of the physical, chemical, and natural sciences which bring the very Creation, as described by Holy Writ, into question. However, the Index dared not attempt to suppress those humble ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... pursued his interests in language and linguistics by collaborating with Professor Daniel Jones of the University of London — inventor of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and prototype for Professor Higgins in Shaw's "Pygmalion" and thus the musical "My Fair Lady". In the same year as Native Life was published, 1916, Plaatje published two other shorter books which brought together the European languages (English, Dutch and German) he loved ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the first roses of California were brought here by them, and it was from the missions that Dr. Robert Semple borrowed the printing type, wherewith he printed the first newspaper in California, which appeared in Monterey in 1846, making the letter "w" by joining two vs as the Spanish alphabet contains twenty-five letters, ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... existing mankind, could not but be entertaining to the young man; and silently, if he wished to read the actual Time, as sure enough he, with human and with royal eagerness, did wish,—they were here as the ALPHABET of it to him: important for years coming. Nay it is not doubted, the insight he here got into the condition of the Austrian Army and its management—"Army left seven days without bread," for one instance—gave him afterwards the highly important notion, that such Army ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... procured a better knife, with which he was enabled to give a more graceful form to his [C with square sides], by rounding it into C; then two such, turned different ways, with a distinguishing cut between them, made CD, to express a thousand; and as, by that time, the alphabet was introduced, they recognised the similarity of the form at which they had thus arrived to the first letter of Mille, and called it M, or 1000. The half of this DC was adopted by a ready analogy ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... was to his untiring energy that the Political Union owed much of its success. In his later years he printed (partly with his own hands) one of the strangest works ever issued from the press, being nothing less than an alphabet, grammar, and dictionary of a new and universal language. On this he must have spent an immense amount of philosophical and philological research during the busiest years of his active life, but like other schemes of a similar character ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... quite surprising what memories they have, and how scrupulously a little carter-boy will deliver half-a-dozen messages, each of a different purport from the rest, to as many persons, all the messages committed to him at one and the same time, and he not knowing one letter of the alphabet from another. When I want to remember something, and am out in the field, and cannot write it down, I say to one of the men, or boys, come to me at such a time, and tell me so and so. He is sure to do it; and I therefore look upon the memorandum as written down. One of these children, boy ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... while I was in constant or occasional attendance at the University of Edinburgh, I taught and assisted young persons, at all periods, in the course of education; from the Alphabet to the highest branches of Science ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... essay, the invented tale. Then, for the vocabulary, obviously our fathers had either to go to Greek, which had invented the A.B.C. of philosophising; or to seek in the other languages which were already ahead of English in adapting that alphabet; or to give our English Words new contents, new connotations, new meanings; or lastly, to do ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Materials for the Science of Language and New Theories; Language and Reason; The Physiological Alphabet; Phonetic Change; Grimm's Law; On the Principles of Etymology; On the Powers of Roots; Metaphor; The Mythology of the Greeks; Jupiter, The Supreme Aryan God; Myths of the Dawn; ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... favourable occasion for giving my mother lessons in that miscalled firmness, which was the bane of both our lives. I believe I was kept at home for that purpose. I had been apt enough to learn, and willing enough, when my mother and I had lived alone together. I can faintly remember learning the alphabet at her knee. To this day, when I look upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and the easy good-nature of O and Q and S, seem to present themselves again before me as they used to do. But they recall no feeling of disgust or reluctance. On the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... She carried him hither and thither, to the Louvre, the Luxembourg, the Salon, insisting with a feverish eloquence and invention that he should worship all that she worshipped—no matter if he did not understand!—let him worship all the same—till he had learnt his new alphabet with a smiling docility, and caught her very tricks of phrase. Especially were they haunters of the sculptures in the Louvre, where, because of the difficulty of it, she piqued herself most especially on knowledge, and could ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the manufacturing, engrossed activity of the town. She was happy. Up here, in the Grammar School, she fancied the air was finer, beyond the factory smoke. She wanted to learn Latin and Greek and French and mathematics. She trembled like a postulant when she wrote the Greek alphabet for ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... De Sacy, and by the Swede, Akerblad. But though the former by a mechanical method recognized correctly the meaning of several groups, and though Akerblad had even ascertained most of the signs of the demotic alphabet, still they were both incapable of discerning the elements of which the demotic ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... Honourable, Learned, and Pious F.M. Baron of Helmont caused to be published in Latin a small Treatise; wholly and fully to the same purpose, with what is here published: Which said Treatise, entituled, The Alphabet of Nature, is now in Hand to be Translated, and Publish'd in English; of which it was thought fit here to ...
— The Talking Deaf Man - A Method Proposed, Whereby He Who is Born Deaf, May Learn to Speak, 1692 • John Conrade Amman
... life; and I, in my capacity, am only striving to teach what Nature has been showing you for thousands of centuries, though you have not cared to master her lessons. The science of to-day is but Nature's first primer—a spelling-book as it were, with the alphabet set out in pictures. You are told by sagacious professors,—who after all are no more than children in their newly studied wisdom,—that human life was evolved in the first instance from protoplasm—as they THINK,—but they lack the ability to tell you how the protoplasm was itself evolved—and ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... almighty and once uttered never remained without effect. He framed the laws by which heaven, earth and all the heavenly bodies are maintained; he ordered the courses of the sun, moon, and stars; he invented drawing and design and the arts, the letters of the alphabet and the art of writing, and the science of mathematics. At a very early period he was called the "scribe (or secretary) of the Great Company of the Gods," and as he kept the celestial register of the words and deeds of men, he was regarded ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... are twenty-five letters in the alphabet! You must be inviting the whole world. You'll have to have the Madeleine enlarged. It won't hold them all. There isn't a church in Paris that will," said ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... a syllabic alphabet which Alf had invented, and which he had amused himself by teaching to some of the natives, so that they might write down and read those few words and messages in their own tongue which formerly they had been wont to convey to each other by means of signs and rude drawings—after ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... symbol for every separate sound; in music it is a name, the idea of which quickly becomes indissociable from the note of the scale which it indicates; in phonetics it is a written letter, which differs from the units of our literary alphabet only in this, that it has but one meaning and interpretation, and really is what all letters were originally intended to be. When you see it ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... sentences, since it was not always possible to get a consistent answer to the question as to what part of a sentence constitutes a single word, and time was too limited for any extensive language study. The following alphabet has been used ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... notions of the duties or the privileges involved by the "contract" of marriage, with no more attempt to analyze the meaning of the term "contract" in this connection than the Protestant Reformers made, but it can scarcely be said that these writers have yet reached the alphabet of the subject ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Christianity should have taken root in Russia after the frequent wars with the Byzantine Empire, and considering the commerce carried on between Kief and Constantinople. Missionaries entered Russia at an early period. Two of them, Cyril and Methodius, prepared a Slavonic alphabet, in which many Greek letters were used, and the Bible was translated into that language. There is a tradition that Askold was baptized after his defeat at Constantinople, and that this is the reason why the people still ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... 's to form the plural of letters of the alphabet, of words spoken of as words, and sometimes numbers. But do not form the regular plural of a word by ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... disposed to go sixpence higher than three ten. They again said it was a pity, for it would be very inconvenient to them if I did not keep to something between a bishop and a poet. I might be anything I liked in reason, provided I showed proper respect for the alphabet; but they had got me between "Samuel Butler, bishop," and "Samuel Butler, poet." It would be very troublesome to shift me, and bachelor came before bishop. This was reasonable, so I replied that, under those circumstances, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... as "Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer"; and in "Chaucers A. B. C., Called La Priere de Notre Dame," a translation by him from a French original, we have a long address to the Blessed Virgin in twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins with one of the letters of the alphabet arranged in proper succession. Nor, apart from this religious sentiment, had men yet altogether lost sight of the ideal of true knightly love, destined though this ideal was to be obscured in the course of time, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... so perfect a poem as Homer's "Iliad" was not the product of the genius of a great poet, but that the letters of the alphabet, being confusedly jumbled and mixed, were by chance, as it were by the cast of a pair of dice, brought together in such an order as is necessary to describe, in verses full of harmony and variety, so many great events; to place and connect them so well ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... hand your game, however amusing, ought to have some finality about it; a game is not really a game unless somebody can win it. For this reason I cannot wholly approve "telegrams." To concoct a telegram whose words begin with certain selected letters of the alphabet, say the first ten, is to amuse yourself anyhow and possibly your friends; whether you say, "Am bringing camel down early Friday. Got hump. Inform Jamrach"; or, "Afraid better cancel dinner engagement. Fred got horrid indigestion.—JANE." But it ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... that. Nothing extraordinary in this, you will say. But there was. The reason why I was so profoundly interested to be a witness of the scene was that they were deaf and dumb, and the whole conversation was carried on by signs; not by the alphabet that one learnt at school in order to communicate during class, but a rapid synthetic improvement upon it, where two or three lightning-quick movements—gesture grammalogues—sufficed to convey whole sentences ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... Amedee recalled the pleasant reading-lessons that the eldest of the Gerards had given him—that good Louise, so wise and serious and only ten years old, pointing out his letters to him in a picture alphabet with a knitting-needle, always so patient and kind. The child was overcome at the very first with a disgust for school, and gazed through the window which lighted the room at the noiselessly moving, large, indented ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... analogy between the letters of our alphabet and their relation to the language of the vast volume of printed books, and the eighty or more primary elements and their relation to the vast universe of material things. The analogy may not be in all respects ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... ask her," said Jeanie. "And you must show that you are in earnest, by trying to say your alphabet this evening. You missed out a great many of the letters yesterday, and I ...
— The Trapper's Son • W.H.G. Kingston
... have been more ludicrously and hopelessly unlike anything we see in a Christian butcher's shop, with every fresh endeavour Abraham has made to find out 'zackly wot de missis do want;' so the day before yesterday, while I was painfully dragging S—— through the early intellectual science of the alphabet and first reading lesson, Abraham appeared at the door of the room brandishing a very long thin knife, and with many bows, grins, and apologies for disturbing me, begged that I would go and cut up a sheep for him. My first impulse of course ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... not know it was your property until after I had carefully deciphered every letter in the name. I agree with you; she writes a very fashionable alphabet. The envelope looked thick, to say the least. It must ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... isolation, I came to view them as bits of analysis, if I may so express myself, made to my hand by Nature, and from the study of which I could conceive of the structure of minds of a more complete, and therefore more complex character. As children learn the alphabet from cards, each of which contains only a letter or two a-piece, printed large, I held at this time, and, with a few modifications, hold still, that those primary sentiments and propensities which form the basis of character, may be ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... and carried it off to the swing. Alas! it was not even Russian and English. It was a fat old French edition, interleaved for notes. The notes were my father's, and in English, which was of some assistance, and I set myself resolutely to learn the alphabet. But my progress was slow, and at last I got my father to write Reka Dom for me in Russian character, as I had determined to master these few letters first and then proceed. I soon became familiar with ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... they become public nuisances, widely destructive to our literature. Their mode of training will explain the nature of the danger. The infant reciting bore is trained much after the manner of a learned pig. Before the quadruped are placed, on certain bits of dirty greasy cards, the letters of the alphabet, or short nonsensical phrases interrogatory with their answers, such as "Who is the greatest rogue in company?" "Which lady or gentleman in company will be married first?" By the alternate use of blows and bribes of such food as pleases ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... little ball of elder-wood suspended by a silk thread. When a stream of electricity, no matter how slight., was sent through the wire, the elder-ball at the opposite end was repelled, such movement designating some letter of the alphabet. A few years later we find Arthur Young, in his Travels in France, describing a similar machine invented by a M. Lomond of Paris, the action of which he also describes.[12] In these and similar cases, though the idea was born and the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... tablets of Egypt and Assyria. After spoken language was developed, and after the rude representation of ideas by visible marks drawn to resemble them had long been practised, some Cadmus must have invented an alphabet. When the use of written language was thus introduced, the word of command ceased to be confined to the range of the human voice, and it became possible for master minds to extend their influence as far as a written message could be carried. Then were communities ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... across the wintry woods. They have a different expression now; they have gone gray and bedraggled, and the midday sun has thawed down the snow and diminished it. There are catkins everywhere, drifts of them in the underbrush, looking like letters of the alphabet piled in a heap. The moon rises, the stars break forth. I am cold and shiver a little, but I have nothing to do in the hut, and prefer to shiver as long as possible. In the winter I did nothing ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... which can take these deaf mutes when small and so teach them to make audible sounds that they can make themselves understood—at least partially. Lip reading is a wonderful improvement over the deaf and dumb alphabet, and should ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... have survived, and still denote what they had denoted in the beginning. In the script of other countries they were gradually transformed into hieroglyphic symbols, after which they either disappeared altogether or became further conventionalized into the letters of an alphabet. These picture-characters, then, accumulated little by little, until they comprised all the common objects which could be easily and rapidly delineated—sun, moon, stars, various animals, certain parts of the body, tree, grass and so forth, to the number ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... that, if some of its grammatical principles could be applied to monosyllables, a new language of great brevity, terseness, regularity, and poetic expressiveness, might be formed. It would be necessary to restore to its alphabet the consonants f, l, and r, and v. Its primitive pronouns might be retained, with simple inflections, instead of compound, for plural. It would be necessary to invent a pronoun for she, as there is, apparently, nothing of this kind ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
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