9. Why Is Schwa Called Schwa?

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 9.

Why Is Schwa Called Schwa?

Why the most common English sound has a Hebrew name, what the strange symbols in the dictionary are called, and where the letters that once belonged to the English alphabet went.

Open an English dictionary and next to the word banana you will find /bəˈnænə/. What is that upside-down e? Why is it called "schwa"? And why does an old pub have a sign saying Ye Olde Tavern, when nobody there ever said "yee"?

At first sight, phonetic transcription looks like a secret code. In fact it is a useful tool with its own history, its own strange names and even its own relatives among letters that English used centuries ago and then forgot. So let us set off on a short journey from a Hebrew dot through runes to American historical documents.

The most common sound in English has no letter of its own

Schwa (pronounced /ʃwɑ/) is a short, weak and relaxed sound. Your mouth is at rest, your tongue lies in the middle and nothing is tense. It sounds a bit like a Czech e said very lazily and very briefly. In transcription we write it with the symbol /ə/.

It is the most common vowel in English. It appears almost always in unstressed syllables and can hide behind any vowel letter:

In American English, schwa also has an r-coloured "sister": /ɚ/, which we hear in teacher /ˈtiʧɚ/ or doctor /ˈdɑktɚ/. It is sometimes jokingly called schwar.

Why "schwa"? Two dots in Hebrew writing

The name schwa comes from Hebrew. In Hebrew writing, vowels are often not written, and readers fill them in from the context. But for textbooks, prayer books and poetry, a system of small marks under and above the letters was created. One of them is shva (Hebrew שְׁוָא): two dots one above the other under a letter.

Shva shows either that no vowel follows the consonant, or that there is only a very short, weak vowel. And this is exactly the sound that 19th-century linguists needed to name. They took the word through German, which is why it is spelled the German way: German sch is English sh. The word schwa came into English at the end of the 19th century.

Where the Hebrew word itself came from is not completely certain. It is often connected with a word for "emptiness" or "nothing", which would suit a weak sound well. Other researchers think of a link with a word for "even, equal", after the two identical dots. What is certain is that in both cases shva means "almost nothing", and that is an exact description of the sound /ə/.

And why an upside-down e? The symbol /ə/ was first used in 1821 by the Bavarian linguist Johann Andreas Schmeller for a weak final vowel in southern German dialects. He simply turned the letter e upside down. Later the International Phonetic Alphabet adopted the symbol, and today you will find it in every English dictionary.

One sound, one symbol: a short look at the IPA

English spelling often tells us little about pronunciation. That is why the International Phonetic Association was founded in Paris in 1886, and two years later it published the first version of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Its basic idea is simple: every sound should have one symbol and every symbol should stand for one sound.

But there were not enough Latin letters. So the creators borrowed from elsewhere: from the Greek alphabet, from Old English manuscripts, from handwritten forms of letters, or they simply turned letters upside down or mirrored them. Each such symbol got its own name. Some names are centuries old, others were created only in modern times.

Ash, eth, theta, esh, ezh and eng: names like something from a fairy tale

The most interesting names belong to symbols that you meet almost daily when you study English:

The pair ð and θ deserves attention. Old Anglo-Saxon scribes used ð and þ (more on that later) without distinction for both sounds of today's th. Only phoneticians decided that ð would be the voiced th in this and Greek θ the voiceless th in think.

The symbol ŋ is surprisingly old. As early as 1619 the English teacher Alexander Gill used it in his book about English pronunciation. It is useful for Czechs because it reminds us that in sing we do not pronounce a clear g at the end: not "sing-g", but /sɪŋ/.

And ʒ, or ezh, is a sound that Czechs know well: it is our ž. In English it is fairly rare; we find it for example in television /ˈtɛləˌvɪʒən/ or measure /ˈmɛʒɚ/.

Nicknames of other symbols

It is not only the "famous" symbols that have names. Every IPA symbol can be named, and some of the names are amusing:

Lost letters and an s in disguise

Old English also had letters that we do not find in today's alphabet: thorn (þ), eth (ð), wynn (ƿ), yogh (ȝ) and ash (æ). Their story, including the secret of Ye Olde signs, is told in the article The Lost Letters of English. For the phonetic alphabet it is important that two of them survived in it: ð as the symbol for the first sound in this and æ as the symbol for the vowel in cat.

The third trace leads to the long s (ſ), a stretched form of the letter s from old prints. It looks almost like f, so in the manuscript of the Bill of Rights (1789) we read Congreſs. Printers abandoned it around 1800, but its shape became the model for the phonetic symbol ʃ, called esh. So our schwa and its first sound /ʃ/ connect a Hebrew dot under a letter with old English printing.

Conclusion: an alphabet that is still alive

The English alphabet has 26 letters today, but its story is much richer. Some letters disappeared, others changed or moved into dictionary transcription. So when you see /ə/, /æ/, /ð/ or /ʃ/, you are not just looking at technical symbols. You are looking at traces of Hebrew scholars, Anglo-Saxon monks, medieval printers and modern phoneticians.

And next time you walk past a sign saying Ye Olde Coffee Shop, you will know that nobody there ever said "yee". It is just a thorn in disguise that still stands there.