Vowels

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The Shwa alphabet includes 12 vowels : all the other letters are consonants, including 5 semivowels. We'll present the vowels and semivowels on this page along with a few other letters, and the consonants on the following pages, so you can see how it works not just for English but for all the other languages. We'll use some technical terms (in italics), but you don't have to remember them.

Vowels

Vowels differ from each other in three main parameters :

• How open your mouth is as you say them
• Where the narrowest point is
• Whether your lips are rounded or spread

Eleven of the twelve Shwa vowel letters fit into a neat little grid based on those parameters. Each letter represents any vowel sound in that range of your mouth - the actual pronunciation varies between languages. Here they are, along with my transcription and the IPA symbols for the sounds in that range (at right is a chart of IPA vowels) :

As you can see, Shwa is much simpler : 11 vowels instead of 28. Shwa cares only about the roles of each vowel in its language, not the exact pronunciation. There's even some overlap between the ranges : a sound may be written with one Shwa letter in one language, and a very similar sound may be written with another letter in a different language.

In the Shwa grid, the first two columns are front vowels and the last two are back vowels. Within each of those groups, the lefthand column is spread (unrounded), while the righthand column is rounded. Front rounded vowels are usually pronounced with the lips compressed, while the back rounded vowels are usually pronounced with the lips protruded. There are no dedicated letters for central vowels, but the inner columns are usually more central than the outer ones.

Within each column there are closed, mid and open vowels. The front rounded column is missing its open vowel - no language has an open front rounded vowel, and in fact it's hard to round your lips when your mouth is open. For the other open vowels, the roundedness isn't so important - the contrast is mostly front, central and back. The a sound in most languages is fairly central, and it's written in Shwa with the a vowel. If there's a contrasting vowel further back in the mouth, it's written with the ah vowel, while a contrasting vowel in the front of the mouth is written with the ae vowel. And the central vowel is often much more open than the others.

Three of these vowels don't occur in English, but they aren't difficult to pronounce :

• The ue is the same sound as English ee as in tee, except that you say it with your lips rounded. Round your lips as if you were going to say too, but then say tee instead.
• The oe is the same sound as English e as in bet, except that you say it with your lips rounded. Round your lips as if you were going to say boat, but then say bet instead.
• The ih is the same sound as English u as in put, but with your lips spread. Spread your lips as if you were going to say pit, then say put instead.
• The ah vowel doesn't occur in American English, but most have heard it in British accents.

The sound in the middle of the IPA chart - the upside-down e - is called schwa (that was one of the inspirations for the name Shwa). It's pronounced with your mouth completely relaxed, and often represents any lazy sound more than a specific mid back spread vowel.

The ih letter is also used for vowels that have been reduced almost to zero. For instance, we use it in English for the vowel in the last syllable of bottle or button. In Chinese, it's used for the apical sounds in si and shi (which used to be written sz and shr in the Yale romanization). In Czech and Serbian/Croatian, it's the vowel in words like vlk and srb that seem to have no vowel.

The twelfth Shwa vowel letter is a rhotic version of the schwa, transcribed er. It's rare, but two languages in which it occurs - Chinese and English - are the world's most spoken languages! Because that sound is so rare, this letter is sometimes used for other, similar sounds, like an open-mid front rounded vowel or a rounded lazy central vowel.

Here are the twelve Shwa vowels, with some examples (from languages without long vowels) :

Shwa	Transcription	English Examples	French	Spanish	Italian	Others
	i	itchy, bit, kit, ship, rip, dim, spirit	si	piso	pira
	e	elbow, bet, dress, step, ebb, hem, terror	ses	peso	pera
	ae	apple, bat, trap, bad, cab, ham, arrow American bath, staff, clasp, dance	sait		perla
	ue		su			Cantonese yu, Turkish ü
	oe		ceux			Cantonese eu, Turkish ö
	er	butter, early, nurse, hurt, term, work	ce			Chinese èr
	ih	bottom, bottle				Turkish ı, Russian ы, Polish y, Romanian î
	eh	button, onion, strut, cub, rub, hum, the				Romanian ä
	a	almond, palm, calm, bra, father, American lot, stop, rob, swan British bath, staff, clasp, dance	sa	paso	parla
	u	cookie, book, foot, full, look, could	sous	pujo	buco
	o	awful, bought, thought, taut, hawk, broad, American cloth, cough, long, laurel, origin	saut	poso	bocca
	ah	British otter, bother, lot, stop, rob, swan, cloth, cough, long, laurel, origin	sot		bosco

All the shapes are written from left to right, and the closed ones are written starting at the top and continuing in a counterclockwise direction. Vowels are normally written low, but are written high when they're stressed or carry a high tone.

Mid Vowels

French, Italian, Catalan and Portuguese all distinguish between closed-mid and open-mid vowels, as do most of the Germanic languages (which we'll discuss below) :

In Shwa, the open-mid sounds on the right are written with open letters. Be careful - English speakers may hear these as the sounds in English bet and bought, which are written with mid letters.

An open-mid front rounded œ vowel is very rare : as far as I know, it only contrasts with its closed-mid sister in French and before nasals in Danish, and it's even being lost in those two languages, where few speakers make distinctions between French jeûne and jeune, or between Danish synds and søns. But if you do need to write the distinction, you can use the Opening suffix, explained below.

Nasal Vowels

Polish, Portuguese and French, for example, have nasal vowels. In Shwa, these are written by appending a Nasal Suffix to the corresponding oral vowel. The Nasal Suffix is a triangle with the point upwards, like your nose, in contrast to i, which points downwards like your chin. In Alphabetic gait, it's written high after high vowels, and low after low vowels.

Here are some examples from French, contrasted with the oral vowel alone and the oral vowel followed by the letter n :

When needed, I'll transcribe the Nasal suffix as a tilde ~, as in ã õ.

Semivowels

A semivowel is a vowel being used as a consonant. Five of the 12 vowels have corresponding semivowels, but not all of them are used in English. Here they are :

• y is the semivowel version of i. It occurs at the beginning of you and the end of we.
• w is the semivowel version of u. It occurs at the end of you and the beginning of we.
• yw, the semivowel version of ue, occurs in French huit and Chinese 月 yuè.
• yh, the semivowel version of ih, occurs in Turkish ağa and Icelandic saga, where it is regarded as a "type of g", and in Korean 의사 ŭisa, where it is regarded as a "type of w". It's also used in Chinese when a word starts with a vowel - it's the "(almost) silent semivowel".
• Both of the r-sounds in English roar are semivowels. This letter is the semivowel version of the er vowel - we transcribe it as wr. As rear and rare also show, it occurs as both on-glide and off-glide. The same sound occurs in Beijing Chinese as a terminal, when 儿 èr is combined with the previous final. Sometimes this sound is alveolar, but more commonly it's retroflex - in any case, we use the same letter.

The central vowel of a syllable is never written with a semivowel, but on-glides and off-glides always are, so that there's only one vowel for each syllable. For example, the Chinese word 水 shŭi (water) is written as shwĕy, not shuĕi, shuĕy or shwĕi. In Shwa, we identify syllables by their central vowels, not by their boundaries. When we write a word like English bottle, we recognize that the second syllable is centered on the reduced vowel ih, but it's not important to decide whether the t sound is the end of the first syllable, the beginning of the second syllable, or both.

Opening Suffix

We have to introduce one more letter before talking about diphthongs: the Opening suffix. Unlike the semivowels, it only occurs after a vowel, so it's a suffix, Also, instead of representing a single target off-glide, it represents a general direction : your mouth opens more.

The Opening suffix is used as an off-glide for long low vowels, and for opening diphthongs, as occur in Irish, Finnish and Thai, for example. I'll transcribe it as wh, although it isn't the breathy wh of English words like which whether whale when they contrast with witch weather wail.

Diphthongs

Many languages feature diphthongs, which are vowels that move as they are pronounced. In Shwa, as in most languages, they're written using letters for the starting and ending positions. But in Shwa, only one of these two letters is a vowel - the other is a semivowel.

If the ending position is more prominent, they're called rising diphthongs, and we write them with a semivowel on-glide before the vowel. Spanish has a full set :

Rising		Example
	ye	ie as in tierra
	ya	ia as in diablo
	yo	io as in rioja
	yu	iu as in viuda
	wo	uo as in cuota
	wa	ua as in cuadro
	we	ue as in fuego
	wi	ui as in buitre

If the starting position is more prominent, they're called falling diphthongs, and we write them with a semivowel off-glide after the vowel. We'll discuss them in two groups, starting with the long vowels.

Long Vowels

If the off-glide is near the vowel, in other words if your mouth doesn't move much between the vowel and the semivowel, we call the diphthong a long vowel. That's the case when the semivowel matches the vowel.

The mid vowels all form long vowels using the semivowel form of the closed vowel in the same column :

Sometimes these sounds really are diphthongs, like English ate, while in other cases they're actually longer versions of the short vowel, with no movement. In Dutch, zee beu boot are diphthongs in the Netherlands and long vowels in Flanders, but in Shwa they're written alike.

All the low vowels use the Opening suffix to form long vowels, so that every short vowel has a corresponding long vowel.

Long Mark

The twelve long vowels are always written in an abbreviated form : without the bottom of the semivowel. The remaining stem of the semivowel, a short vertical line, is called the Long mark - I'll transcribe it with a colon :.. In Alphabetic gait, it's written high for high vowels, low for low vowels.

But the Long mark is not a letter, it's just an abbreviation : long vowels written with the Long mark are encoded and alphabetized as if the semivowel were written out in full.

Cross Vowels

When a falling diphthong is not a long vowel, I'll call it a cross vowel, because it crosses your mouth from one position to another.

Several cross vowels cross to the front of your mouth :

Others cross to the back of your mouth :

Others cross to the bottom of your mouth, as in Thai :

We also use the opening suffix even if they don't get all the way to the bottom of your mouth, as in Finnish :

Finally, we use the wr semivowel for centering diphthongs, as in English, Irish and Khmer:

Germanic Vowels

Now we're in a position to look at examples that include long and cross vowels. The Germanic languages have some of the largest vowel inventories in the world, so let's look at some of them.

Shwa	English	Dutch	German	Danish	Swedish
Short Vowels
	bit	zit	bitten	hist	sill
	bet	zet	Betten	held	hetta
	bat		baten	hælde	hätta
		nut	Bütten	hyld	syll
			Böttingen	høst	nött
	bird		einer
	bottle		einen		full
	bud	de	eine		begå
	balm				matt
	book		Butten	hund	bott
	bought	zot	Bottich	hold	moll
	British bob	zat		hård
Long Vowels
	beet	zie	bieten	bil	sil
	bait	zee	beten	hel	hel
			bäten	hæl	häl
		nu	wüten	hyl	syl
		beu	böten	hør	nöt
					ful
		la	baten	hal
	boot	moe	buhten	hun	bot
	boat	boot	Booten	hob	mål
				hår	mat
Cross Vowels
		boei
	boy	mooi	Beute
	by	saai	weiten	mig
				møg
		mei
		lui
		nieuw		stiv
		meeuw		levn
		ruw		syv
				øvrig
	bout		Bauten	hav
		kou
	earring
	arrow
	army
	order
	tourist
Shwa	English	Dutch	German	Danish	Swedish

Triphthongs

Some languages have triphthongs, with two semivowels, which are straightforward extensions of what you already know. A vowel can be followed by two off-glides as in English hire and flour (which some people distinguish from the two-syllable words higher and flower) :

The English word pure even has three semivowels : one on-glide and two off-glides!

Thai even has long diphthongs where a long vowel is followed by a cross off-glide, as in ยาย.

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