| See Schwa (art) for the underground artist.
In linguistics and phonology, schwa is the neutral, mid central unrounded vowel
sound, exactly in the middle of the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart. In phonetic transcriptions, it is written as
ə (rotated e).
Schwa is the most common vowel sound in English, the unstressed vowel in many unstressed syllables, like the 'a' in about or the 'o' in
synonym. It is most easily described as sounding like the British
English "er" or the American English "uh". It is a very short
neutral vowel sound, and like all vowels, its precise quality varies depending on the adjacent consonants. In most varieties of English, schwa only occurs in unstressed syllables, but in New Zealand English and South African English the high front lax vowel (as in the word bit) has shifted open and back
to sound like schwa, and these dialects contrast stressed and unstressed schwas.
Quite a few languages have a schwa sound. It is similar to a short French unaccented e, which in that language is rounded and less central. It is almost always
unstressed, though Bulgarian and Afrikaans are two languages that allow stressed schwas. In the Dutch language, the vowel of the suffix -lijk, as in
waarschijnlijk (probably) is pronounced as a schwa. In some varieties of Catalan (notably Barceloni) an unstressed "a" is
pronounced as a schwa.
Other spellings of the sound include
ė in Lithuanian,
ă in Romanian, and ë in Albanian.
Sometimes the epenthetic vowel is called a "schwa", but not all
languages use the schwa as the epenthetic vowel.
Origin of the term
The word "schwa" (pronounced "sh
əwa", later "sh
əva") originally referred to one of the niqqud vowel points used with the
Hebrew alphabet, which looks like a vertical pair of dots under a
letter. An approximate meaning of the name itself in Hebrew is "nought". This sign has two uses, one to indicate the schwa
vowel-sound and one to indicate the complete absence of a vowel. These uses do not conflict because schwa is, in Hebrew (and
English) considered a "null" sound, the equivalent, or allophone, of "no vowel at
all". English or Hebrew speakers asked to pronounce, say "Mxpltzk", are most likely to use schwa at least 3 or 4 times. The schwa
sound appears in French or German too, but has its own distinct identity. This is probably the reason the English sound is named
after the Hebrew one, rather than the more obvious examples of the same sound in more-related French or German.
Schwa Indogermanicum
The term "schwa" is also used for vowels of uncertain quantity (rather than neutral sound) in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. It was observed that,
while for the most part "a" in Sanskrit corresponds to "a" in
Latin and Ancient Greek, there are instances where Sanskrit has "i"
while Latin and Greek have "a", such as pitar (Sanskrit) vs pater (Latin and Ancient Greek). This postulated "schwa
indogermanicum" evolved into the theory of the so-called laryngeals, Most
scholars of Proto-Indo-European would now postulate three different phonemes rather than a single indistinct schwa. Some scholars
postulate yet more, to explain further problems in the Proto-Indo-European vowel system.
The Schwa symbol
The schwa symbol
ə is used as a letter in various languages:
- In Azeri it represents a front a vowel. But, when using
ə, the Azeri language has problems with the Turkish encoding, so,
sometimes ä has been used instead.
- In the Latin Chechen alphabet. The use of this alphabet is
politically significant (as Russia prefers the use of the Cyrillic alphabet, against the separatists' preference for Latin).
- In the latin transliteration of Avestan. The corresponding long vowel is written
as schwa-macron
ə̄.
- In some Cyrillic alphabets including: Kazakh, Bashkir, Udmurt and other languages of the ex-USSR; see Schwa (Cyrillic).
In languages where the schwa represents a full phoneme, and may appear word-initially, a capitalized version is sometimes
required. In some cases, capital schwa looks like a larger version of the schwa symbol, encoded as U+18f
Ə, but an inverted capital E has also been used, e.g. for Avestan personal names (U+18e
Ǝ).
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