Shwa

See Schwa (art) for the underground artist.

In Linguistics and Phonology , schwa can mean:

An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in any language, often but not necessarily a Mid - Central Vowel (rounded or unrounded). Such vowels are often transcribed with the symbol , regardless of their actual phonetic value.

The mid-central vowel sound in the middle of the vowel chart, stressed or unstressed. In IPA Phonetic Transcription , it is written as . In this case the term ''mid-central vowel'' may be used instead of ''schwa'' to avoid ambiguity.

The symbol is itself called schwa.

THE TERM

The , the equivalent of "no vowel at all".

Sometimes the term "schwa" is used for any Epenthetic Vowel ; however, different languages use different epenthetic vowels.

THE SCHWA SOUND

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''. Many British English dialects have two schwa sounds, whereas many American English dialects have only one. Schwa 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 mostly occurs in unstressed syllables (exceptions including concerted), 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 include both stressed and unstressed schwas. In General American , schwa is one of the two vowel sounds that can be Rhotacized . This sound is used in words with unstressed "er" syllables, such as ''dinner''.

Quite a few languages have a sound similar to schwa. It is similar to a short French unaccented ''e'', which in that language is rounded and less central, more like an Open-mid or Close-mid Front Rounded Vowel . It is almost always unstressed, though Bulgarian and Afrikaans are two languages that allow stressed schwas. Many Caucasian Languages and some Uralic Languages (e.g. Komi ) also use phonemic schwa, and allow schwas to be stressed. In the Dutch Language , the vowel of the suffix ''-lijk'', as in ''waarschijnlijk'' (''probably'') is pronounced as a schwa. In the Eastern dialects of Catalan , including the standard language variety, based in the dialect spoken in and around Barcelona , an unstressed "a" or "e" is pronounced as a schwa (called ''"vocal neutra"'', "neutral vowel"). In the dialects of Catalan spoken in the Balearic Islands , a stressed schwa can occur.

Other spellings of the sound include in Lithuanian , in Romanian , and ë in Albanian .

THE SCHWA SYMBOL

The schwa symbol ("turned e") is used as a Grapheme in various languages:

In Azeri it represents a front ''a'' vowel, . But, when using , 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 Separatist s' preference for Latin).

In the Latin transliteration of Avestan . The corresponding long vowel is written as schwa-macron .

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 , but an inverted capital E has also been used, e.g. for Avestan personal names (U+18e , with a separately-coded lowercase, U+1dd ).

SCHWA INDOGERMANICUM

-h₂- in contemporary notation.

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Shwa