The Shwa Alphabet for English	Contents

Consonants

Here are the English consonants, along with examples of their use:

The last four letters are called semivowels - they're vowels being used as consonants. The awe semivowel isn't used in American English.

You may never have thought about it before, but we English speakers pronounce l very differently at the end of words or syllables, as in the difference between oily and oil. In Shwa, we use a different letter for this "dark" final l.

The Break is used when a syllable starts with a vowel, or at the unexpected start of a new syllable.

Vowels

Here are the English short vowels :

The otter vowel doesn't occur in American English. Where Brits use it in words like cot, Americans use the almond vowel, and where Brits use it in words like caught, Americans use the office vowel. Here's how the two dialects write low vowels in Shwa:

British	Lexical Set	American
	trap, bad, cab, ham, arrow
	bath, staff, clasp, dance
	palm, calm, bra, father
	lot, stop, rob, swan
	cloth, cough, long, laurel, origin
	thought, taut, hawk, broad

In English, the rhythm of a word - which syllables are stressed and which aren't - is very important. In Shwa, stressed vowels are written high - in the top half of the line - and unstressed vowels are written low - in the bottom half of the line.

English also has reduced vowels, special vowels that are only used in unstressed syllables, including many "little words" that aren't usually stressed. You've already met two of these reduced vowels: the ugly sound in words like a, the, of, about, above, ago and bottom; and the early sound in words like her, bother and butter. The third is a close spread back vowel in words like is, it, its, if, his, in, message, bottle and button. You can hear the contrast in Rosa's grocer's roses.

Usually, the high vowels i and u reduce to ih, and the others reduce to uh unless followed by an r. But pay no attention to how it's written - just listen to it. And not every unstressed vowel is reduced, either (when an unstressed vowel is not reduced, it's called secondary stress).

Here are the English diphthongs, short vowels with an off-glide:

Some Americans pronounce north and forth differently; for them, the vowel in north is written with the otter short vowel.

In British and Antipodean dialects (and in Boston), the rhotic off-glide is pronounced as an opening off-glide, and it's written that way in Shwa :

When the off-glide matches the vowel (or close enough), we call it a long vowel, and we abbreviate it by writing just the stem, which is called the Long mark.

English has one other diphthong: the vowel in unit, beauty, few and mute. For example, the vowel in fuel is the same as the vowel in fool, except there's a semivowel y in front of it. When a semivowel occurs in front of the vowel, we call it an on-glide.

English also has triphthongs, which are written with two off-glides. For some people, they contrast with two-syllable words.

There are also words with both on-glides and off-glides, sometimes even two off-glides!

Tricky Parts

As mentioned elsewhere, Shwa spells English at a more phonetic level than we now do, so you have to be a little more aware of how we actually pronounce our language. Fortunately, there are only a couple of tricky parts to learn. You already encountered reduced vowels; the other has to do with aspirated consonants.

The little hooks on the noses of the letters p t k ch indicate that these sounds are aspirated in English : they're pronounced with a little puff of air at the end. But we don't aspirate those sounds after an s, so words like span Stan scan are written as sban Sdan sgan in Shwa, and discussed is spelled the same as disgust (but discouraged is spelled with a k!).

Samples

Now that you've learned how it works, why don't you try reading some sentences?

And here's a limerick:

And a couple of famous quotes.

© 2002-2012 Shwa	shwa@shwa.org	13jan12