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Each chapter is written using words limited to consonants and a single vowel, producing sentences like: "Hassan can, at a handclap, call a vassal at hand and ask that all staff plan a bacchanal". [1] The author believes "his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language."
An example of a univocalic novella is Georges Perec's Les Revenentes , in which the vowel "E" is used exclusively. The sentence Je cherche en même temps l'éternel et l'éphémère (which means "I seek the eternal and the ephemeral at the same time") from this book has appeared as the epigraph for the last chapter of Life: A User's Manual.
A syllable is long if it contains a long vowel or a diphthong: Ae-nē-ās, au-rō. It is also long (with certain exceptions) if it has a short vowel followed by two consonants, even if these are in different words: con-dunt, et terrīs, tot vol-ve-re. In this case a syllable like et is said to be long by position. [3]
Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar phonemes in words or syllables that occur close together, either in terms of their vowel phonemes (e.g., lean green meat) or their consonant phonemes (e.g., Kip keeps capes ). [1]
Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech apparatus) moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most varieties of English, the phrase "no highway cowboy" (/ n oʊ ˈ h aɪ w eɪ ˈ k aʊ b ɔɪ / noh HY-way KOW-boy) has five distinct diphthongs, one in every syllable.
For instance, it is now thought the 3 may have been an alveolar lateral approximant ("l") in Old Egyptian that was lost by Middle Egyptian. The consonants transcribed as voiced (d, g, dj) may actually have been ejective or, less likely, pharyngealized like the Arabic emphatic consonants. A good description can be found in Allen. [1]
A short diphthong had the same length as a short single vowel, and a long diphthong had the same length as a long single vowel. [125] As with monophthongs, their length was not systematically marked in Old English manuscripts, but is inferred from other evidence, such as a word's etymological origins or the pronunciation of its descendants.
Consonance may be regarded as the counterpart to the vowel-sound repetition known as assonance. Alliteration is a special case of consonance where the repeated consonant sound is at the stressed syllable, [ 2 ] as in " f ew f locked to the f ight" or "a r ound the r ugged r ock the r agged r ascal r an".