[Mesorah] shwa

[Art Werschulz]

Hi.

On Jul 1, 2018, at 11:34 PM, Toby Katz via Mesorah <mesorah at lists.aishdas.org> wrote:

> In modern English dictionaries' pronunciation guides, there is a vowel called a "schwa" that is represented as an upside-down letter "e."  Any vowel in an /unstressed/ syllable in a word -- a, e, i, o, or u -- may be pronounced as a schwa. 

I learned about the schwa back in first grade (we might've used "shwa").  The dictionary we kids used had a mini-guide to pronunciation printed at the bottom of each page (e.g., ā [macron a] as in "able", ă [breve a] as in "at", and so forth).  They said that schwa was pronounced as "e" in "father" and "i" in "pencil" (they gave examples for "a", "o", and "u", but I don't remember what they were).

Wikipedia has a nice article about the schwa, giving the following pronunciation examples, along with their IPA transcriptions:
'a', as in about [əˈbaʊt]
'e', as in taken [ˈtʰeɪkən]
'i', as in pencil [ˈpʰɛnsəl]
'o', as in memory [ˈmɛməri]
'u', as in supply [səˈplaɪ]
'y', as in sibyl [ˈsɪbəl]
various combinations of letters, such as 'ai' in mountain [ˈmaʊntən]
unwritten, as in rhythm [ˈɹɪðəm]

("IPA" is "International Phonetic Alphabet", not "India Pale Ale".)  

The name "schwa" is a German transliteration of the Hebrew word שוא, which explains the "w".

Art Werschulz
agw at comcast.net



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