Schwa
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the free encyclopedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa
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 In
linguistics,
specifically phonetics
and phonology,
schwa can mean the following:
- An unstressed
and toneless
neutral vowel sound in any language, often but not necessarily
a mid-central vowel. Such vowels are often transcribed
with the symbol
<ə>,
regardless of their actual phonetic value.
- The mid-central
vowel sound (rounded or unrounded) in the middle of
the vowel chart, stressed or unstressed. In IPA
phonetic
transcription, it is written as the phone
[ə].
In this case the term mid-central vowel may be
used instead of schwa to avoid ambiguity.
- The Latin
letter ə and the Cyrillic
letter ә (see their respective articles).
The term
The word
"schwa" is from the Hebrew
word שְׁוָא (šĕwā’,
/ʃəˈwa/,
modern pronunciation: /ʃva/),
meaning "nought"—it originally referred to one of the niqqud
vowel
signs used with the Hebrew
alphabet, which looks like dots under a letter ("ְ")
and which in modern
Hebrew is pronounced either [ɛ]
or not at all. This sign has two uses: one to indicate the
phoneme
/e/ and one to indicate the complete absence of a vowel.
These uses do not conflict because schwa is, in Hebrew,
an epenthetic
vowel, the equivalent of no vowel at all.
Schwa as a neutral vowel
Sometimes the term "schwa" is used for any epenthetic
vowel, even though different languages use different
epenthetic vowels (e.g., the Navajo epenthetic vowel is
[i].
Schwa is the most common vowel
sound in English,
a reduced
vowel in many unstressed syllables,
especially if syllabic
consonants are not used:
- like the 'a' in about [əˈbaʊt]
- like the 'e' in taken [ˈteɪkən]
- like the 'i' in pencil [ˈpɛnsəl]
- like the 'o' in eloquent [ˈɛləkwənt]
- like the 'u' in supply [səˈplaɪ]
- like the 'y' in sibyl [ˈsɪbəl]
Many British
English (BrE) dialects have two schwa sounds, whereas
many American
English (AmE) dialects have only one. Schwa 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 include BrE 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 Albanian,
Bulgarian,
and Afrikaans
are three 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 Dutch,
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. Stressed schwa
can occur in Romanian
as in mătură [ˈməturə]
('broom').
Other characters used to represent this sound include ը
in Armenian,
ă in Romanian,
and ë in Albanian
and Turoyo.
In Bulgarian
Cyrillic,
the letter ъ
is used.
Schwa indogermanicum
The term "schwa" is also used for vowels of uncertain quality
(rather than neutral sound) in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European
language. It was observed that, while for the most part
a in Latin and Ancient
Greek corresponds to a in Sanskrit,
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. Most reconstructions
of *-ə-
in older literature would correspond to *-h2-
in contemporary notation.
External links
See also
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa
Published - November 2008
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