Prong

“ Proctorized, TO BE, to be stopped by the Proctor, and told to call on him.—University.
Prog, meat, food, &c. Johnson calls it “a low word.” He was fond of “prog,” however.
Proof, the best ale at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Prop, a blow. As, “a PROP on the nose,”—more street slang than pugilistic.
Prop, a scarf pin.
Prop-nailer, a man who “sneaks,” or rather snatches, pins from gentlemen’s scarves.
Proper, very, exceedingly, sometimes used ironically; “you are a PROPER nice fellow,” meaning a great scamp. A “PROPER man” generally means a perfect man, as far as can be known. ”

“ Yet a proctor is only human. Strip him of his gown and bands, examine his flexors and extensors, and you might even come to a profound contempt for him. This, unfortunately, is not permitted even to the most curious freshman; the giant's robe hedges about even a liliputian proctor with the glamour of the unpleasant office. Your cigar goes up your sleeve, driven there by a subtle instinct, when he approaches; your broken hat seems to gather itself together and to tremble upon your head. ”

“ It is that of a man in a black morning coat and a tall silk hat. The man has a vulgar face and does not always pay tribute to the aspirates. He is a college servant, in fact, a butler or gyp promoted to the honours of the bulldog's state during his master's term of office. And now he stands before the amazed freshman proffering his meek request—
"The proctor would like to speak to you, sir."
The freshman takes his cigar out of his mouth, and is conscious of a curious sensation. Is this, then, the moment he has looked for? Has a proctor really come down to earth? ”

“ The freshman believes no such tale. A proctor to him is a ghostly apparition rising up from the limbo of lost policemen. The bulldogs are resurrected assassins lusting for horrid deeds. By-and-bye when he has forgotten his desire to see such rogues, and has brought himself to believe that proctor are myths, and that practically you can wear any sort of cap, and smoke where and when you like in Cambridge, his system receives a shock. ”

“ A Pronoun is a word assumed instead of a noun, and indicating definite persons. It has six accidents: Person, Gender, Number, Case, Form, and Species.
22. On Primitive Pronouns.
The Persons of the Primitive Pronouns are ἐνώ, σύ, ἴ; those of the Derivative Pronouns, ἐμός, σός, ὅς. The Genders of the Primitive Pronouns are not expressed in speech, but by the indication which they make, as ἐγώ (I) , whereas the Genders of the Derivatives are expressed in speech, as ὁ ἐμός, ἡ ἐμή, τὸ ἐμόν. The Numbers of the Primitives are—Singular, ἐγώ, σύ, ἴ ”

“ The Latin perfect came to be restricted to its aorist sense, and the perfect was expressed by compounds of habēre with the perfect participle. In the Romance languages all compound tenses were eventually formed in this way: ai cantat, avia cantat, aurai cantat, etc. In Provençal the auxiliary is sometimes ęsser, instead of avẹr, if the main verb is reflexive, passive, or neuter; ęsser is particularly common with neuter verbs of motion: sọi vengütz. [112] A participle used with avẹr may agree in gender and number with the direct object, if there is one: ai cantat or cantada la cansọ. ”

“ I may be mistaken, but I take the truth to be that modern Provençal is, after all, a dialect only, and not, as was so long and passionately claimed by the confederate poets, a language. As a matter of fact, it resembles the plastic idiom of the ancient Troubadours very little more than it resembles modern French, and certainly no more than it resembles Gascon, Catalan, or the Italian of the Western Riviera. ”

“ There are, however, some ‘spelling-pronunciations’ that are positively mischievous. Many people, though hardly among those who are commonly reckoned good speakers, pronounce forehead as it is written. To do so is irrelevantly to call attention to the etymology of a word that has no longer precisely its etymological sense. When the thing to be denoted is familiar, we require an identifying, not a descriptive word for it; and we obey a sound instinct in disguising by a contracted pronunciation the disturbing fact that forehead is a compound. ”

“ For want of attending to this distinction, some writers have roundly asserted, that many dissyllables have two accents, such as convoy, concourse, discord, shipwreck: in which, and similar instances, they confound the distinctness, with which the latter syllables are necessarily pronounced, with accentual force; though nothing can be more different. Let us pronounce the last syllable of the noun torment as distinctly as we please, it will still be very different with respect to force, from the same syllable in the verb to torment, where the accent is on it ”

“ Nü2, thou, or you, is the common form of the pronoun in the second person. I [pronounced as in machine] is used for he, she, it, they, or them. Pronouns, like other words in the Chinese language, may be either singular or plural, as best suits the connexion. Nëng5, man, is often appended to pronouns, as the sign of the plural; as Nguai2-nëng5, or, Nu5-nëng5, we, or us; Nü2-nëng5, you; I-nëng5, they.
Ki5, the sign of the genitive case, may be placed after any of the pronouns, in the same manner that it is used after nouns. For the possessive case of pronouns, other forms are often used ”

“ Thus in di-ameter, di-urnal, etc. the first syllable is equivalent to the verb to die. A corrupt, foreign manner of pronouncing these words may sometimes mince the i into e, as if the words were written de-ametur, de-urnal, etc. but this is disgusting to every just English ear, and contrary to the whole current of analogy. Besides, the vowel that ends and the vowel that begins a syllable are, by pronouncing the i long, kept more distinct, and not suffered to coalesce, as they are apt to do if i has its slender sound. ”

“ We have already seen that in the Maya there is a special pronoun [36] which unites a predicate to the idea of person into one sentence. There is also another which by itself conveys the idea of the verb, and of which each person has the signification both of the pronoun and the substantive verb, “I” and “I am,” “thou” and “thou art,” etc. Not only is it so used in the present, but it can take the signs of the tenses. ”

“ In the diphthongs ue, uo (luec, fuoc) , [5] opinions disagree as to which vowel originally bore the stress; subsequent changes seem to indicate that in the 12th and 13th centuries the practice varied in the different dialects. Old Provençal must have had in some words a peculiar type of r, which was sufficiently palatal in its articulation to call for an i-glide before it (esclairar) ; we do not know precisely how it was formed; in most regions it probably was assimilated to the more usual r as early as the 12th century. ”

“ The letter s after st, from the very difficulty of its pronunciation, is often sounded inarticulately. The inhabitants of London, of the lower order, cut the knot, and pronounce it in a distinct syllable, as if e were before it, but this is to be avoided as the greatest blemish in speaking: the three last letters in posts, fists, mists, etc. must all be distinctly heard in one syllable, and without permitting the letters to coalesce. For the acquiring of this sound, it will be proper to select nouns that end in st, or ste ”

“ In this respect Provençal is quite anomalous among Romance languages. In some regions of the Alps, at Nice, at Montpellier, at Le Velay, in Haute-Auvergne, in Roussillon, and in Catalonia the Latin final a is preserved, as in Italian and Spanish.
The noun has but one form for the singular and plural. The distinction of plural and singular depends upon the article, or upon the demonstrative or possessive adjective accompanying the noun. In liaison adjectives take s as a plural sign. So that, for the ear, the Provençal and French languages are quite alike in regard to this matter. ”

“ The breaking of ę, ǫ, under certain conditions, into diphthongs is not common to the whole territory, and the resulting forms show local differences: mĕum > męu mięu, fŏcum > fǫc fuǫc fuęc füc. Breaking is least common in the southwest.
[10] II. PHONOLOGY.
14. Inasmuch as Provençal, like the other Romance languages, grew out of the Latin commonly spoken under the Roman Empire, we must take this latter language as our starting-point. The transformation was so gradual and continuous that we cannot assign any date at which speech ceases to be Latin and begins to be Provençal ”

“ In literary Latin the u was shortened, but the popular speech seems to have kept ū beside ŭ. The Provençal 1st and 2d pers. sg. apparently come from fūī, ✱fūstī = fuĭstī (although Pr. füi might be taken from fŭī) , while the other forms presuppose ŭ:
1. A rare fo in the 1st pers. sg. seems to be simply borrowed from the 3d. In the 3d pers. sg., fon beside fo is due to the analogy of -on -o in the 3d pers. pl., and, in general, of such double forms as bon bo, mon mo, son so, ton to: cf. § 63, (5) . Fonc shows the influence of tenc, venc.
(3) Vidēre > vezẹr has: [142]
1. ”

“ And—Porges!—dear, quaint, Small Porges! where under heaven could he ever find again such utter faith, such pure unaffected loyalty and devotion as throbbed within that small, warm heart? How could he ever bid “Good-bye” to loving, eager, little Small Porges?
And then there was Miss Priscilla, and the strong, gentle Sergeant, and Peterday, and sturdy Adam, and Prudence, and the rosy-cheeked maids. How well they all suited this wonderful Arcadia! ”

“ Scarcely any reason can be given why custom prefers one sound to the other in some words; and why, in others, we may use either one or the other indiscriminately. It is strongly to be presumed that the i and y, in this situation, particularly the last, was generally pronounced long by our ancestors, but that custom has gradually inclined to the shorter sound as more readily pronounced, and as more like the sound of these letters when they end a syllable after the accent ”

“ It may, indeed, be observed, that there is scarcely any thing more distinguishes a person of mean and good education than the pronunciation of the unaccented vowels. (547) (558) When vowels are under the accent, the prince, and the lowest of the people in the metropolis, with very few exceptions, pronounce them in the same manner; but the unaccented vowels in the mouth of the former have a distinct, open, and specific sound, while the latter often totally sink them, or change them into some other sound. ”

“ Perry, Entick, and Fry, pronounce the eo like long open o, as if written yōman: and this last appears to me to be the most received pronunciation. It is that which we constantly hear applied to the King's body guard, and it is that which has always been the pronunciation on the Stage; an authority which, in this case, may not, perhaps, improperly be called the best echo of the public voice. I well remember hearing Mr. Garrick pronounce the word in this manner, in a speech in King Lear: "Tell me, fellow, is a madman a gentleman, or a yōman?" ”

“ In English, when the relative or interrogative pronoun is governed by a preposition, the pronoun very often comes before the governing word: as, What are you speaking about? The man that he gave the book to is here. In colloquial Irish it is a very common practice to separate the relative particle from the preposition which governs it ; but instead of using a simple preposition at the end of the sentence, as in English, we use a prepositional pronoun. Thus we can say—an fear ag a ḃfuil an ḃó, or more usually, an fear a ḃfuil an ḃó aige, [2] the man who has the cow ”

“ Attracted by such words as these, arbor became masculine. There were some other less important shifts.
1. Juventus, passing into the second declension, became masculine (ioven) ; but we find also ioventut, f. Laus became masculine in Provençal; fin, on the other hand, is always feminine. Mĕrŭla > merle, m. Correitz, linh, both m., occur beside correia < corrĭgia, linha < līnea. Other similar changes might be noted. Pr. dia (also di) , like Latin dīes, is usually masculine.
90. Some nouns passed from the fourth to the second declension in the classic Latin period (dŏmus, fīcus) ”

“ We must recognize two classes of adjectives: (1) those which in Latin distinguish the feminine from the masculine; (2) those which do not.
1. Adjectives like acer, which, though inflected after the 3d declension type, could distinguish the m. from the f. in the nom. sg., fell into one or the other—usually the first—of the following classes (agre agra, alegre alegra; terrestre terrestre) .
(1) Masculine and feminine different:—
(2) Masculine and feminine alike:—
[96] 1. Some adjectives of the second class were attracted into the first either in Vulgar Latin or in Provençal ”

“ Anglo-Saxon profast agrees with the German words in substituting the prefix pro for prae. Compare Pfründe.
prüfen, verb, ‘to try, examine, prove, test,’ from Middle High German prüeven, brüeven (preterite pruofte) , weak verb, ‘to demonstrate, consider, count, test, put right’; this verb, which is of frequent occurrence from the 12th century, is based on Old French prover (Modern French prouver) , which is again derived, like Italian provare, from Latin prŏbâre. The abnormal üe of the Middle High German verb comes from East French üe (East French prüeve, from Latin prŏbat) . ”