SCHWA: Background on
| The schwa represents the lightly pronounced, unaccented "uh" sound in many English words that have more than one syllable. Of course, certain words are pronounced differently from one region to another, so in some instances, the vowel sound is no longer a schwa but takes on a different vowel sound altogether. For instance, some might pronounce the "i" in "happily" and "verity" as a schwa, whereas others might pronounce it as a barred-i. |
| Linking schwa in Dutch compounds: a phonomorpheme? Anneke Neijt, Center for Language Studies, Nijmegen In Dutch, compounds are formed with or without linking elements, cf. zin+s+bouw ‘sentence structure’, woord+en+boek ‘dictionary’ (lit. ‘word book’) and woord+bouw ‘word structure’. fil-m |
| For Barker, Schwa is alternately his pseudonym, a fictitious omnipresent corporation, a religion, or a resistance movement against corporate conspiracies and aliens. Often it's a combination of all four at once. Bill Barker wikipedia |
| The word 'schwa' comes from a Hebrew word, approximately transliterated as 'sheva', or 'shewa', which means 'nothingness'. The 'e' in the transliteration is a short phonetic [schwa] sound, ie what some books call the 'neutral' vowel, the 'obscure' vowel, or the 'indeterminate' vowel. In Hebrew, there are two sorts of schwa. One of them is a vowel sound which has a centralish quality; the other signals the absence of a vowel - hence the 'nothingness' meaning. To discover the reason, then, why there's a connection between the word and the sound, we have to go back to the 'e' between the 'sh' and the 'v' in the Hebrew word. The name 'schwa' came into English via German. According to the OED, the first time it was used in English was in 1895: see Peter Giles's 'A Short Manual of Comparative Philology for Classical Students', page 134, beginning of section 169. The actual [schwa] symbol, ie the inverted letter 'e', has been in phonetics for much longer. The first person to use it with the modern IPA value was the German linguist Johann Andreas Schmeller (1785-1852) in 1821; many people subsequently used it during the course of the 19th century, but the name of the symbol, schwa, didn't surface in English until Giles and his 1895 book. Before Schmeller, the symbol had been used, but for a totally different sound." Wikipedia EN Wikipedia NL |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa