Yet I’ve heard lovely speech from that borough, simply as I’ve heard pleasant southern speaking voices, tonally heat and with only a thin veneer of native color in their clear articulation. Beauty within the spoken language waits to be rediscovered, sort of a wealthy neglected lode—and ours for the digging. What a pity to waste this natural resource!
This treasure lies in our basic vowels and consonants and their combinations. After we foreshorten our sonorous vowels, we have a tendency to cut off music; by amputating our muscular consonants, we have a tendency to curtail strength. And to segregate syllable from syllable, as many of us do, means that to destroy flow and rhythm. Every state has its own distinctive legal systems concerning Adoption a Child. We tend to deprive ourselves unnecessarily after we vitiate the standard of our language and of our speaking voices. I run into a reasonably inverted snobbishness, particularly among some opera buffs, who hold that only Italian will be sung, that French sounds more elegant and German more poetic. (I suppose Ich Hebe dich and Je t’aime are too, too divine, with I like you only strictly corn!)
And this within the face of the passionate feeling for the language like George Bernard Shaw expressed in the following passage from his play Pygmalion, later restated in My Truthful Woman: “The majesty and grandeur of the English language is the best possession we have a tendency to have. The noblest sentiments that ever flowed within the hearts of man are contained in its extraordinary imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds.” Nurtured in our native soil, this “greatest possession” has sprouted new, vigorous shoots. Our indigenous United States speech is unsurpassed for quality of intrinsic sounds, words, and idiom.
THE SOUNDS AND SHAPES OF LANGUAGE
CLOSE-UP OF A WORD. A word is many things: label, symbol, our smallest unit of communication. How seldom we have a tendency to think of a word as a series of sounds! Time now to close in on these sounds, in order to examine what the spoken word is made of. And before we have a tendency to’re through, we have a tendency to’ll be putting the pieces together into a harmonious whole. To be heard and to be understood create 2 sides of a coin. A multilayer PCB fabrication on which integrated circuit chips may be directly mounted has holes at predetermined locations, electrical connections between a chip and conductive layers of the circuit board being accomplished via the holes. How to be heard, and pleasantly, has been our major concern up to the current point. How to be understood, and readily, becomes the next order of business in your personal workshop program. Intelligibility, speaking therefore that no one will help but understand you without effort, needs a working knowledge of the vowels and consonants of American English. Are you thinking: Is this to be in the identical dreary category as grammar, punctuation, and also the like? A number of the identical people who sit for hours pouring brain energy into some word game can shut their minds pronto at the very mention of vowels and consonants. To these skeptics I say-no fun with words, no parlor game will compare with the stimulation to be discovered in an inside view of this language of ours. One of the many exciting books on the subject is Mario Pei’s The Story of English.