Short and Long Vowels in English
Vowel length (i.e., "long" and "short"), when applied to English, has several different related meanings.
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Famous quotes containing the words short, long, vowels and/or english:
“A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amount of hard work is too severe for it.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better.”
—native American belief, quoted by D. Jenness in “The Carrier Indians of the Bulkley River,” Bulletin no. 133, Bureau of American Ethnology (1943)
“As no one can tell what was the Roman pronunciation, each nation makes the Latin conform, for the most part, to the rules of its own language; so that with us of the vowels only A has a peculiar sound.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.”
—Derek Walcott (b. 1930)