The Alphabet: An Account of the Origin and Development of Letters, Volume 1

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K. Paul, Trench & Company, 1883 - 398 pages
 

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Page 209 - Then he took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And there was great indignation against Israel : and they departed from him, and returned to their own land.
Page 337 - ... but it is only within the last five or six years that the profession have come to appreciate the great truths which he labored to establish.
Page 28 - Every word in Chinese is monosyllabic, and the same word without any change of form, may be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, or a particle. Thus ta, according to its position in a sentence, may mean great, greatness, to grow, very much, very.
Page 259 - Spartan politicians of the end of the 5th or the beginning of the 4th century.
Page 68 - We have letters, syllables, and ideograms piled up one on another in a perplexing confusion. So many crutches were thought necessary that walking became an art of the utmost difficulty. But all the same, in the tangled wilderness of the hieroglyphic writing the letters of the alphabet lay concealed. All that remained to be done was to take one simple step — boldly to discard all the non-alphabetic elements, at once to sweep away the superfluous lumber...
Page 235 - ... to his neighbour, for there was an excess (?) in the rock on the right. They rose up . . . . they struck on the west of the (4) excavation, the excavators struck, each to meet the other, pick to pick.
Page 32 - AB C's. At any rate the usefulness of such a procedure never dawned upon them. As one of the baneful results, according to Taylor, it may fairly be said that with the Chinese method it takes twenty years instead of five to learn to read and write, and most people cannot be expected to attain to these arts.
Page 82 - Sanchuniathon, from which we gather that the Phoenicians did not claim to be themselves the inventors of the art of writing, but admitted that it was obtained by them from Egypt.
Page 179 - They are pronounced with the forepart of the tongue, the breadth of which approaches the whole anterior space of the hard palate as far as the teeth...
Page 304 - Khan, and was used in Khiva and Bokhara, which now employ the Arabic. The Mongolian is written in vertical columns, from the top to the bottom of the page, instead of from right to left, like the Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew.

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