NYMPH. The belief that the nature which surrounds mankind - the woods, the springs, the hills - is full of a life resembling, yet different from, human life is universal in a primitive stage of thought. At Psophis in Arcadia a row of tall cypress trees was called cti z-cipeEvot, the damsels. In other places the name K.:Spat was used, but the general term for the spirits who dwell in external nature was I/4 4w. All three words have the same meaning. There is a close relation between the souls of dead men and the life of nature ; the Nymphs often play the part of death and carry away human beings to dwell with them. This idea appears in a slightly different form when heroes and favoured mortals live in communion with them. The connexion of a human being with a Nymph has something unnatural about it, and almost always brings some disaster on the mortal. Yet another form' of the idea appears in the word vv,u430oprros ; he whose mind the Nymphs take possession of loses his human wit and becomes mad, but has wisdom more than human. The worship of the Nymphs was practised throughout the classical period in places where they seemed to have chosen a home for themselves, in shady groves and beside springs of clear water. It retained its primitive simplicity. No temple, no statue, no priest was needed ; the offerings of a rural people were placed on the simple altar. The cultus is therefore not often mentioned in literature ; but it appears to have been closely connected with the household life of the people, and to have had a strong hold on them. Among the ceremonies of marriage an acknowledgment of the power of the Nymphs was included. The bride, herself a viyuk, was sprinkled with water from the fresh spring of the Nymphs, or she went to bathe in the spring.

The Nymphs, the ever-youthful spirits of nature, protected and nourished children (Kovp074950/.); they were themselves often, especially in Asia Minor, the mothers of the heroes of the land. In the Troad, Hermes and the Sileni sport with them in the mountain caves. Their life was long, according to Hesiod 9720 times that of man ; it was a common belief that they were born and died along with the trees of the forest. It was usual to distinguish Nymphs of the rivers and fountains, Naiads, from those of the forests and mountains, Dryads, Hama-dryads, Oreades ; but they were all Kalpat Ath, the maidens of heaven, or, in more anthropomorphic language, the daughters of Zeus. The worship of the Nymphs became more fashionable in later time, and shrines of Nymphs (vv,whaF.a) were built even in cities.

The history of the symbol 0 is parallel to that of 0 E. Each represents several sounds which are distinguished habitually in speech without any difficulty, but for which, owing to the imperfection of the English alphabet, there are no separate symbols. Probably the confusion is worst in English ; but French and Italian also have more sounds for each of these symbols than can be properly included under them, and so they distinguish these sometimes by diacritical marks, as a or 6, and sometimes they do not distinguish at all.

The different sounds which 0 is used to denote in English lie, with one exception, on the line between the pure a-sound and the pure u-sound. We have already seen that e denotes several different sounds on the other line - that between pure a and pure i. The difference between the sounds on these two lines is this. In the a - i line only the tongue is employed ; it is raised more and more for each successive sound. But in the a - u line the tongue is not the only agent ; the cavity of the mouth is also contracted, so that the passage is narrowed, and the lip-aperture is lessened more and more for each sound ; in technical phrase the lips are "rounded," so that for u the aperture is the smallest possible to allow of the utterance of a true vowel, hence the great ease with which the -u-sound passes into a w, in which there is friction caused by the still greater closing of the lips, and therefore we have a consonant not a vowel sound.

The following different sounds - denoted by 0 in English - are readily discriminated. Beginning from the a-end of the line, we come first to the sounds heard in " not " and in " lord " ; for both of these the back of the tongue is much depressed and the lips are only slightly rounded. The difference between the two sounds consists in this - for the first the back of the tongue is more convex than for the second ; the passage is therefore somewhat narrowed, and the two corresponding sounds are therefore (here and in all the other similar pairs) known technically as " narrow " and "wide," or as " open " and " close." The narrow sound is written by o in English when r or 1 follows, and the wide is written aw as in " law," or au as in " Paul," or even a as in " pall." The next pair may be exemplified by " pole " and "pour," narrow and wide respectively ; for these the tongue is higher and the rounding greater. Here again several digraphs represent the same sound, as in " foal," " soul," "hoe," "grow." Next the doubled o io generally used to represent the last sound in the scale, *he close it, for which the tongue is highest and the " rounding " greatest, as in "pool"; but in " rule " and others the same symbol is used for this sound as would be used in other European languages. Lastly - the exception mentioned above - o is one of the symbols employed to denote the neutral vowel, as in " son," as well as u in " sun " and a in " final."

The modified German o - written o or oe - is a sound unknown in English. It is produced by putting the tongue into the position for the sound denoted by a in " fate " or e in "fete " - a middle sound in the line between a and i - and then by rounding the lips. It thus combines the specialities of the two scales of vowel:soundthe i-scale and the u-scale.

In Italian there are an " open " o (marked o) and a " close " o (marked 6). The " open " o corresponds to the open or wide sound described above. The " close " o is not quite the same as the "narrow" o of English, but comes a little nearer to u.

In the form of the symbol there is no recorded variation, except that in old Latin it was sometimes square, as <>- In Greek two symbols were employed-0 and 2 - for short and long o respectively. But it is not improbable that the second of these denoted at first not merely long o but a more open sound, more near to the sound of " law " in English.