Here’s My New Vowel: ə

How to pronounce ə

Photo by Valeria Reverdo on Unsplash

August 17: If you were to create a new vowel, what would it be? (Pentremites)

The letter “ə” would replace all of the other vowels when they don’t make either the long sound or the short sound that they are supposed to. Most of you won’t know what the hell I’m on about. But Pentremites asked the question, so…

The letter “a” usually says its own name (long) as in April or the short sound as in cat.

The letter “i” usually says its own name (long) as in ice or the short sound as in fish. Kiwis excepted. Sorry.

I could replicate this for the other vowels e, o, and u.

But you get the idea. “ə” would replace vowels that weren’t long or short. Let’s take constipation. We say con with a short o, but we don’t say stip with a short i like flip, we say stəp. You see that ə replaces the “i”. pa is a long a, and tion is pronounced shən. So we would write the word thus.

constəpashən

I probably picked a confusing example. Let me try again. custard. Nothing wrong with “cus”, but do we say “tard” as in tardy. You might, but I don’t. :-)

No, I say

custəd.

Let’s look at my name. I like it to be pronounced the French way. (Yeah, I know I’m posh, but it’s my name!)

adrien

But people want to pronounce it adriən. That’s the boy’s name Adrian.

Okay, I’m done here, confusing the lot of you. Thanks, Pentremites!

Thanks for reading. Ask questions in the comments if you’re perplexed.

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