Tuesday, September 4, 2012

There's only one Schwa...

My little brother needed some help learning some music. Thank goodness for skype. One song was in German so I helped him with the pronunciation. The other song I told him he'd be fine with since it's in English. Then I looked at the music and ate my words a little. The English wasn't even real English. Luckily there were pronunciation keys to some of the words. Anyway, I looked at one that said the following:

Kilvarnet -- Kihl-VAHR-nuht; the "uh" sound is the neutral, unaccented schwa.

This is where I ask for the name of your phonetician. I'm very sorry to tell you this, but there is no other kind of schwa. If it's not neutral and unaccented then it ceases to be a schwa. That's all there is to it. Anyone reading that little note either (1) knows what schwa means, therefore rendering the adjectives completely superfluous or (2) doesn't know what it means and will simply disregard it on account of its having too many consonants in a row.

I'm not sayin'; I'm just sayin'.

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