A Quick Look at Shwa

Let's start by looking closely at one word.

The Shwa letters are in blue, and the black letters below them are my transcription into the English alphabet. As you can see, the Shwa letters don't correspond exactly to English letters, but they correspond to the English sounds.

The first letter represents the English short vowel ae as in apple. All the triangular vowels are front vowels, and this one is upside down (the ice cream would fall out of the cone), since it's an open vowel. The fact that it looks a little like English A is a coincidence, but if it helps you remember it, that's fine.
It's written high (in the upper half of the line) because it's accented, or stressed.
The second letter represents the sound of L at the end of syllables, for example in All bells will peal, which I transcribe as ll. This is a different L than the one at the beginning of syllables, as you can hear when you say oil versus oily. The flat foot points to the right - backwards - because this ll is pronounced in the back of the mouth: it's velar.
The third letter is the Shwa f. All consonants are twice as tall as vowels, and they're composed of a top and a bottom. The top of this letter is curved, since it's a fricative: as you say it, your airstream is made turbulent but not blocked. The top points to the right to indicate that this sound is unvoiced - your vocal chords aren't vibrating as you pronounce it.
But the bottom is sharp, since f is not a sibilant, and it points forward (to the left) to show that the f sound is made in the front of your mouth. So the shape of each letter indicates its sound.
The fourth letter is written low (in the lower half of the line) because it's unstressed. In fact, the a is even reduced to the sound of uh in ugly, and this is reflected in the spelling. Linguists call this sound schwa, and that's one of the inspirations for the name of our new script.
The fifth letter is another consonant - you can almost figure it out already:
- The top is sharp, so it's a plosive, made by stopping the airstream and then releasing it.
- The top points left, so it's voiced
- The bottom is sharp, so it's not sibilant (we call sibilant plosives affricates).
- The bottom points left, so it's in the front of your mouth.
So it's a voiced plosive in the front of your mouth : the sound of b.
The sixth letter is another front vowel, neither open nor closed: e as in elbow. It's written low, unstressed but not reduced.
The seventh letter is another consonant. The little hook on its nose tells you it's an aspirated plosive (all unvoiced plosives are aspirated in English); the pointy bottom tells you it's in the center of your mouth: t.

Shwa spells English at a more phonetic level than we now do, so you have to be more aware of what you're saying. The advantage is that foreigners will also pronounce English more correctly, and you'll pronounce their languages more correctly as you read them in Shwa.

Of course, you don't have to figure all this out as you read Shwa! You'll just learn the letters, as you did with the Latin alphabet when you learned to read English. And Shwa doesn't have capital letters or digraphs like ng th sh ch, so there are fewer letters even though they represent more sounds.

But the fact that the letter shapes form a system is a big advantage, both for learning English and in case you spot an unfamiliar letter in a foreign language. Since Shwa is a universal script, it has letters for all the sounds we don't have in English, too! But you don't need to learn all those letters - just the ones for the languages you want to read and write.

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