The other consonants are the same, perhaps, as Mr. Davidson incidentally mentions.

(2) Vowels in Chaucer have much the same value as in modern German; consonants are practically the same as in modern English.

He loves a Welshman extremely for his diet and orthography; that is, for plurality of consonants, and cheese.

Thus the letter "m," one of the four "liquid" consonants, is, as we now write it, only a shortened form of a waved line; and as a waved line it was originally written, and was the character by which a stream of running water was represented in writing; indeed it only owes its name to the fact that when the lips are pressed together, and "m" uttered by a continuous effort, a certain resemblance to the murmur of running water is produced.

Omitting this, therefore, and taking all the other vowels and consonants whether actually represented in the device or not, I now got the proverb in the form mens sana in ... pore sano.

We crossed into Hungary, rolled northeastward for five or six hours into the Vag valley, with its green hills and vineyards and ruined castles, and finally came to a little place consisting almost entirely of consonants, in the Tatra foot-hills.

The customary device, where contemporaries are concerned, of disembowelling the victim's name, and leaving it a skeleton of consonants, is a formal concession which in effect concedes nothing.

Mackenzie has adopted the French orthography, giving the vowels, and some of the consonants and diphthongs, sounds very different from their English powers.

It does not seem to me at all probable that an Englishman or a Scotchman should throw aside his natural sounds of the vowels and consonants, and adopt sounds which are, and must have been, from infancy, foreign.

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.

He drew a strong line of distinction between the names and the sounds of the consonants.

Every vowel, except w, may form a syllable of itself; but the consonants belong to the vowels or diphthongs; and without a vowel no syllable can be formed.

Consonants should generally be joined to the vowels or diphthongs which they modify in utterance; as, An-ax-ag'-o-ras, ap-os-tol'-i-cal.[110] RULE II.VOWELS.

By aiming to divide on the vowels, and to force the consonants, as much as possible, into the beginning of syllables, they often pervert or misrepresent our pronunciation.

With respect to the first of these objects, Walker observes, "When a child has made certain advances in reading, but is ignorant of the sound of many of the longer words, it may not be improper to lay down the common general rule to him, that a consonant between two vowels must go to the latter, and that two consonants coming together must be divided.

4. Eighty-nine rules for "the sounds of the consonants, according to position."

Lowth says, "The best and easiest rule, for dividing the syllables in spelling, is, to divide them as they are naturally divided in a right pronunciation; without regard to the derivation of words, or the possible combination of consonants at the beginning of a syllable.

But, according to Rule 1st, "Consonants should generally be joined to the vowels or diphthongs which they modify in utterance."

"Consonants are letters, which cannot be sounded without the aid of a vowel.

"Letters are divided into vowels and consonants.

"Consonants are divided into mutes and semi-vowels.

"Two consonants proper to begin a word must not be separated; as, fa-ble, sti-fle.

But my friend "the Irish clergyman" wrote me a full account of what he heard with his own ears; which was to the effectthat none of the sounds, vowels or consonants, were foreign;that the strange words were moulded after the Latin grammar, ending in -abus, -obus, -ebat, -avi, &c., so as to denote poverty of invention rather than spiritual agency;and that there was no interpretation.

It has more rhime in it, according to the ancient, and true sense of the word, than rhime itself, as it is now used: for, in its original signification, it consists not in the tinkling of vowels and consonants, but in the metrical disposition of words and syllables, and the proper cadence of numbers, which is more agreeable to the ear, without the jingling of like endings, than with it.

My mouth was shut, but words rolled their sounds through my earsmonotonous sounds with but one or two consonants and one or two vowels.