Phonological History of English High Front Vowels/meet-meat Merger

Famous quotes containing the words history, english, high, front and/or vowels:

    If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.
    Josiah Royce (1855–1916)

    So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.
    Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

    No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work on high things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Bobby read his future in women; his girls were omens, changes in the weather, and he’d sit all night in the Gentleman Loser waiting for the season to lay a new face down in front of him like a card.
    William Gibson (b. 1948)

    Playing “bop” is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
    Duke Ellington (1899–1974)