6 days after we said goodbye to April, Shikha had to have surgery on his paw to remove a foreign body (which didn’t turn out to be there after all!) He kept walking around shaking his leg, trying to get rid of the yellow bandage with smiley faces on it. It lasted all of 24 hours. He said It Didn’t Make Him Feel Like Smiling and he Wasn’t Putting Up With It Any Longer.
Jj is for Jottings 46. Schwa – the Undercover Vowel.
There’s a sneaky little vowel which we say many times every day and are probably quite unaware of it. Its name is “schwa”, its phonetic symbol is /ə/, and it sounds like a little grunt. It’s the undercover vowel because it doesn’t have its own alphabet letter to represent it; instead it likes to sneak in under the cover of a variety of different letters. You can often hear it in syllables which are not the main emphasis of the word. Examples are: photograph, adore, supermarket. Just to be crystal clear, here is where it is in those words: photəgraph, ədore, supəmarkət – two of them in the last one.
Why do we need to know about schwa? If you don’t know how to spell a longer word, any syllables containing /ə/ will give absolutely no clue as to how to spell the vowel in that syllable. As you can see from the examples above, they all have different spellings, and schwa sneaks in under the cover of many more vowels than those four. So there are times when you just have to remember some things visually.
Schwa is often referred to as the neutral vowel or the reduced vowel. It’s kind of colourless and flavourless, and is produced with the least effort of all vowels, with the tongue sitting in the middle of the bottom of the mouth to produce it.
There’s another reason why you need to know about /ə/ – and I’ll tell you about that in Jottings 47. In fact, I began to write the next article but discovered that I needed to write this one first!
P.S. For a bit of a laugh, have a look at what Kieran shared last night on the “Aa is for Alpacas” Facebook page. They reminded me of giant French poodles.