What do you get if you multiply 86 by 95? You get schwa, that's what. Chances are your first response to a difficult question like that is, "er ...". Exactly: er. But it's usually not that long. It's an ickle vowel sound, unstressed and so uncared for that it doesn't have   its own letter but has to borrow from others. It's the a in ago, the e in silent, the i in unit, the o in reason, the u in circus. In fact, there are more than 40 ways of spelling it. It's actually the commonest sound in the English language. And after people ignored it for centuries, phoneticists finally took pity on it and gave it a name - schwa, from a Hebrew symbol indicating a unwritten vowel - and a symbol - the letter 'e' upside down. RB²

about » submit » archive »