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xkcd #2907: Schwa
(imgs.xkcd.com)
Thank you!
the link to the wikipedia page with the audio clip really helped, made no sense without that.
I had no idea what the name of the sound was so I credit being a native speaker and reading the comic out loud with my understanding.
Do read it out loud - the more you exaggerate it the more fun it is.
Cannot believe how smart this guy is. If 10% of the planet were like Randall we would’ve cured cancer like the second time somebody got diagnosed with it.
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Never have I needed the explanation more than with this one.
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I bet these sentences sound super weird if you try to pronounce them without using any schwas.
You would probably just sound like a non-native speaker. I assume it would be similar to weak forms and how weak forms are usually absent from non-native english speech.
As a non-native speaker, I was kinda confused at first by this comic because in my head the vowels definitely didn't sound all the same. But I personally consider pronunciation of vowels in English to be one of the greatest mysteries in the universe, so no wonder.
As a native English speaker and Spanish learner, consistent vowel pronunciation is so incredible. 🥺 Just looking at a word and knowing how to pronounce it… amazing stuff. Kind of wild that in some languages you don’t have the ‘curse of the self educated’ (randomly mispronouncing words you’ve only read, not heard spoken).
Yeah that blew my mind about Spanish. I was like, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN ALL THESE VOWELS ALWAYS HAVE THE SAME SOUND??? YOU ARE ALLOWED TO DO THAT!??"
Then I started trying to learn to conjugate verbs and I was like ohhhhh, ok, so fuck me.
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Great.. now it reads like Apu from Simpsons.
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Don't a lot of these use the "strut" vowel (/ʌ/) and not schwa (/ə/) per se?
My transcription would be
/wʌts ʌp? wʌz dʌg gənə kʌm? dʌg lʌvz bɹʌntʃ. nʌʔʌ dʌgz stʌk kəz əv ə tʌnəl əbstɹʌkʃən. ə tɹʌk dʌmpt ə tʌn əv ʌnjənz. ʊχ./
They merge in many accents merge these two sounds as Dr Geoff Lindsey explains here.
Thank you for reminding me of this channel, I'd forgotten about it.
Interesting about the merging. Schwa has always been weird for me because in my dialect it can be many sounds. I grew up saying "obstruction" as [ʌbstɹʌkʃɪn] like those around me. Then I hit grade school and was told by a straight-faced teacher that both the first and last syllables in this and similar words were schwas while pronouncing them differently :)
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You use the same vowel for 'what' as you do for 'up'?
:confused Australian noises:
Oh you're Australian. Yeah, most dialects in the US say "what" and "up" with a schwa.
Wut up. The 'u' vowel sound in "up" is the same one in "what" in most American dialects.
The schwa is the same vowel sound in duzza. Wuzza uppa.
yup
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ləl
Most phonologists I know would probably use wedge for most of these since they're stressed, because schwa is usually considered just an unstressed allophone of a bunch of different English vowels, and not an actual phoneme itself. Also, I have syllabic l in tunnel and barred i in cousin.
I came here to say this. A bunch of these vowels are definitely pronounced with a wedge. Even tried intentionally pronuncing the stressed vowels with a schwa, and it's noticeably, jarringly off.
I don't get it.
I'm even more confused now...
They're all using only the 'uh' sound for every non-silent vowel in each word.
That 'uh' sound is apparently called the schwa in linguistics.
(edit: clarified after i had already hit the post button)
All the vowels make an 'uh' sound when you read the sentence out loud
As a northern Englishman, this doesn't work for me
Although if I say it fast and lazily I guess it kinda does
Going through the comments, I've just learned so much about what makes my accent distinct and that uh and uh are apparently different
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Took me a goddamn while. Goddamn English and the lack of phonetic spelling!
I was a little slow too because some of those words have other possible pronunciations
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I love this one. Fucked with my head a bit.
Aaron earned an iron urn + Baltimore accent.
That video makes me cackle every damn time 🤣.
Holy shit that's impressive
This is reminiscent of a brief storyline from the Scrubs season that never happened.
The trend of dropping all vowels implies schwa subsuming them all.
Tangentially related to getting stuck in a tunnel obstructed by onions: one time I was stuck in a traffic jam on I-95 in Philadelphia, traffic completely stopped for about three hours. Eventually we got moving again and passed the source of the jam. A semi carrying a load of honeydew melons had caught fire. I would have thought melons contained enough water to prevent them from burning, but that was not the case.
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Would love hearing someone saying it out loud. I can't do it myself
Yet it doesn't have its own letter!
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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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