> To find out about the schwa read any book on phonetics (e.g. J. D. O'Connor, PHONETICS, Penguin 1973). It is one of the 'phonemes' that make up the array of sounds that we actually speak. For example, it is obvious that an 'oo' sound occurs in both the words 'whose' and 'beauty', but the everyday spelling gives no hint of it. I very early taught my students the International Phonetic Alphabet and they had great fun in discovering what the real sounds we spoke actually were. I used to start with their own names. It was of huge benefit in teaching poetry, as well as analysing the rhetorical rhythm of prose (and of advertisements!), as it demonstrated where the repetition of vowels and consonants really was. O'Connor gives IPA complete; it is very easy to learn as many of the symbols correspond to normal orthography. The schwa is the phoneme that very many vowel sounds in unstressed positions tend to gravitate to, hence its being the most common phoneme. It is written in IPA as an upside-down 'e'. Typical occurrences are the last 'e' in 'advertisement' and 'president'; the last syllables of 'honour', 'weather', 'ladder', etc; the first 'o' and the 'a' in 'photography'; the first and last 'a' in 'American'; the vowel-sound in 'the' (when not emphasized, for then it is pronounced 'thee' -- at least in English English!); and so on. The IPA font can be obtained for your laptop (PC or Mac). It is called 'IPA Kiel Seven' and is obtainable in a package with other phonetic fonts from Linguist's Software, P.O. Box 580, Edmonds WA, 98020 - 0580; email address [log in to unmask] Edmond Wright > To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: > http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html > and select "Join or leave the list" > > Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/