Phonological History of English High Front Vowels/met-mat Merger

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

    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 much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?
    Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.
    Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)

    The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

    A man’s destination is his own village,
    His own cooking fire, and his wife’s cooking;
    To sit in front of his own door at sunset
    And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson
    Playing in the dust together.
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    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)