WEBVTT
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Language: en

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English spelling is really hard to learn.

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Because history.

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The examples that are usually used to demonstrate
that are things like

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the o-u-g-h words: cough, through, dough,
and so on.

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But there are other reasons too, and one of
them involves this.

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It’s a character so important to English
that it has its own name:

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“schwa”.

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To explain it, let’s start by talking about
this letter.

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What does that sound like?

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In school, we’re taught the name of it,
/eɪ/.

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And, sure, it can sound like that,
in words like “later”.

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But you’re actually making two separate
vowel sounds there:

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/eɪ/.

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“Later”.

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Sometimes kids are taught this letter
as just /æ/.

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And it can sound like that too,
in words like “cash”.

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But it can also be the /ɔː/ in “call”.

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And depending on your accent,

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and I’ve got to sound really posh
to make this work,

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it could also be the /ɑ/ in “bath”.

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That’s really at the back of the mouth,

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it sounds completely unnatural for me.

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But! This letter can also sound
like the /ə/ in “about”.

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And that sound, /ə/, is the one
we’re interested in here.

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Linguists have a chart, part of the International
Phonetic Alphabet, to talk about vowel sounds:

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and it goes all the way from a vowel like /i/,

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which is produced with the highest bit of
your tongue near the front of your mouth,

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tongue really close to the roof,

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to /ɑ/, highest bit of the tongue at
the back, not close to the roof.

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/i…ɑ/.

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If you study linguistics, then your first
few lessons of phonetics are basically just

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a group of people all making
the same weird sounds

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and then trying to understand what the bits
of their mouth are actually doing.

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Someone usually tries to poke around to feel
where their tongue is

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and nearly makes themselves throw up.

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Anyway, sitting right in the middle of that
chart is that /ə/ from “about”.

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Represented by the “schwa”.

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It is central, everything just kind of sitting
in the middle,

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it’s the vowel that requires the least effort.

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/ə/ is the vowel you use when you’ve got
to make a sound but don’t know what to say.

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“Uhh…”

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So yes, schwa is the A in “about”,
but it's also the E in “petition”.

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The last I in “definite”.
The first O in “potato”.

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And the U in “support”.

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I said English spelling was a mess.

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No wonder that “definate” with an A is
such a common misspelling:

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if you don’t know that it has
the same root as ‘finite’,

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it’s fair to think that it’s spelled that way.

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That schwa sound, defin-uh-t gives you very
little information about what letters to use.

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So what’s the difference between
those two words?

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Well, in “finite”, there’s
stress on “nite”.

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But in “definite” we don’t stress that
syllable anymore, so it gets reduced.

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Meaning that its vowel gets reduced to schwa,
the least-effort vowel sound.

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Every vowel letter in English, A, E, I, O, U,
is capable of being reduced to schwa.

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Not always, but they’re capable of it.

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Sometimes, vowels like that
are reduced so much

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that they disappear entirely,
in words like these.

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Your dialect may be different, of course,

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and if you pronounce the words on their own,
there may still be something there.

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But give me a story to read out about a
“sep’rate choc’late cam’ra”,

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and there’s no schwa in the middle
of any of those.

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Vowels get reduced even further in quickly-spoken,
slurred sentences.

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So, the formal way to pronounce
this sentence would be:

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“I’m Going To Go To The Store.”

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But in real life, in my accent,

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if I was just saying that to a friend as I
was headed out the house,

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I’d reduce it to something like:

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[at half speed]
/ə̃mə̃nəgʌʔɾəðə stɔː/

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Almost every vowel in there was schwa.

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There was a bit of stress on ‘go’,
a bit of effort went in there.

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And “store” couldn’t get reduced to
/stə/.

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But other than that, it was all schwa.

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“I’m Going To” was reduced to /ə̃mə̃nə/.

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American speakers might reduce it differently
to either /a͡imə/ or /əmə/.

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That’s not lazy, that’s not wrong, that’s
just how language works.

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We all convert between those reduced vowels
and fully-spelled-out words instinctively,

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although it’s something that people learning
English aren’t always taught:

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they often have to pick it up by themselves.

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And that’s one of the reasons why,

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when occasionally, when you get these
well-meaning spelling reformers who say

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“well, every word should just be spelled
how it sounds”,

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they haven’t thought it through.

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There are loads of English words that have
more than one pronunciation:

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not just because of accent,

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but because most of the time,
we reduce the vowels to schwa.

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Thanks to my co-authors,
Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.

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Gretchen has a great podcast called Lingthusiasm,
the link is in the description.