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Betty Botter
Betty Botter is a tongue-twister written by Carolyn Wells. It was originally titled "The Butter Betty Bought." By the middle of the 20th century, it had become part of the Mother Goose collection of nursery rhymes. Construction The construction is based on alliteration, using the repeated two-syllable pattern /'b__tə 'b__tə 'b__tə/ with a range of vowels in the first, stressed syllable. The difficulty is in clearly and consistently differentiating all the vowels from each other. :They are almost all short vowels In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, f ...: :/æ/ batter :/e/ better - Betty :/ɪ/ bitter - bit o' :/ɒ/ Botter :/ʌ/ butter :with one long vowel /ɔ:/ 'Bought a' Lyrics When it was first published in "The Jingle Book" in 1899 it read: Betty Botta bought som ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tongue-twister
A tongue twister is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly, and can be used as a type of spoken (or sung) word game. Additionally, they can be used as exercises to improve pronunciation and fluency. Some tongue twisters produce results that are humorous (or humorously vulgar) when they are mispronounced, while others simply rely on the confusion and mistakes of the speaker for their amusement value. Types of tongue twisters Some tongue twisters rely on rapid alternation between similar but distinct phonemes (e.g., ''s'' and ''sh'' ), combining two different alternation patterns, familiar constructs in loanwords, or other features of a spoken language in order to be difficult to articulate. For example, the following sentence was said to be "the most difficult of common English-language tongue twisters" by William Poundstone. These deliberately difficult expressions were popular in the 19th century. The popular "she sells seashells" tongue twister was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carolyn Wells
Carolyn Wells (June 18, 1862 — March 26, 1942) was an American mystery author. Life and career Born in Rahway, New Jersey, she was the daughter of William E. and Anna Wells. After finishing school she worked as a librarian for the Rahway Library Association. Her first book, ''At the Sign of the Sphinx'' (1896), was a collection of literary charades. Her next publications were ''The Jingle Book'' and ''The Story of Betty'' (1899), followed by a book of verse entitled ''Idle Idyls'' (1900). After 1900, Wells wrote numerous novels and collections of poetry. Carolyn Wells wrote a total 170 books. During the first ten years of her career, she concentrated on poetry, humor, and children's books. According to her autobiography, ''The Rest of My Life'' (1937), she heard ''That Affair Next Door'' (1897), one of Anna Katharine Green's mystery novels, being read aloud and was immediately captivated by the unraveling of the puzzle. From that point onward she devoted herself to the myst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mother Goose
The figure of Mother Goose is the imaginary author of a collection of French fairy tales and later of English nursery rhymes. As a character, she appeared in a song, the first stanza of which often functions now as a nursery rhyme. This, however, was dependent on a Christmas pantomime, a successor to which is still performed in the United Kingdom. The term's appearance in English dates back to the early 18th century, when Charles Perrault’s fairy tale collection, ''Contes de ma Mère l'Oye'', was first translated into English as ''Tales of My Mother Goose''. Later a compilation of English nursery rhymes, titled ''Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle'', helped perpetuate the name both in Britain and the United States. The character Mother Goose's name was identified with English collections of stories and nursery rhymes popularised in the 17th century. English readers would already have been familiar with Mother Hubbard, a stock figure when Edmund Spenser pub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alliteration
Alliteration is the conspicuous repetition of initial consonant sounds of nearby words in a phrase, often used as a literary device. A familiar example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". Alliteration is used poetically in various languages around the world, including Arabic, Irish, German, Mongolian, Hungarian, American Sign Language, Somali, Finnish, Icelandic. Historical use The word ''alliteration'' comes from the Latin word ''littera'', meaning "letter of the alphabet". It was first coined in a Latin dialogue by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano in the 15th century. Alliteration is used in the alliterative verse of Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Irish. It was an important ingredient of the Sanskrit shlokas. Alliteration was used in Old English given names. This is evidenced by the unbroken series of 9th century kings of Wessex named Æthelwulf, Æthelbald, Æthelberht, and Æthelred. These were followed in the 10th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ''ignite'' is made of two syllables: ''ig'' and ''nite''. Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing". A word that consists of a single syllable (like English ''dog'') is called a monosyllable (and is said to be ''monosyllabic''). Similar terms include disyllable (and ''disyllabic''; also '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress. The word ''vowel'' comes from the Latin word , meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). In English, the word ''vowel'' is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y). Definition There are two complementary definitions of vowel, one phonetic and the other phonological. *In the phonetic definition, a vowel is a sound, such as the English "ah" or "oh" , produced with an open vocal tract; it is median (the air escapes along the middle of the tongue), oral (at least some of the airflow must escape through the mouth), frictionless and continuant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms ''stress'' and ''accent'' are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called ''pitch accent'', and when produced through length alone, it is called ''quantitative accent''. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called ''stress accent'' or ''dynamic accent''; English uses what is called ''variable stress accent''. Since stress can be realised through a wide range of phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch (which are also used for other linguistic functions), it is difficult to define stress ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vowel Length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in: Arabic, Estonian, Finnish, Fijian, Kannada, Malayalam, Japanese, Latin, Old English, Scottish Gaelic, and Vietnamese. While vowel length alone does not change word meaning in most dialects of English, it is said to do so in a few dialects, such as Australian English, Lunenburg English, New Zealand English, and South African English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike in other varieties of Chinese. Many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically, meaning that vowel length does not change meaning, and the length of a vowel is conditioned by other factors such as the phonetic characteristics of the sounds around it, for instance whether the vowel is followed by a voiced or a voiceless conso ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lynn Tomlinson
Lynn Tomlinson is an animator and artist. She is a professor at Towson University. She lives in Baltimore, MD, with her husband, Craig J Saper, and her family. She holds degrees from Cornell University (BA, English), the University of the Arts (MA, Art Education), the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania (MA, Communication), and Towson University (MFA, Studio Art). She has taught at Cornell University, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Delaware College of Art and Design, Richard Stockton College, and Tufts University. Her films have been screened at film festivals around the world over the past two decades. She has received awards and grants including several Mid-Atlantic Emmys, an ITVS production grant, and Individual Artist Fellowships from the State Arts Councils of Pennsylvania, Florida, and Maryland. Filmography *''Both Sides Now'' (Clay-on-glass, 1998) – 1 min. Segment for ''A Little Curious'' on HBO Family. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
