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From: rte@elmo.lz.att.com (Ralph T. Edwards)
Subject: Re: schwa
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References: <405kir$psk@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk> <407ign$1r7@pheidippides.axion.bt.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 8 Aug 1995 16:05:50 GMT
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In article <407ign$1r7@pheidippides.axion.bt.co.uk>, Alwyn Thomas
<thomasda@forum.agw.bt.co.uk> wrote:

> etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) wrote:
> >Does anyone try to argue that schwa is not a phoneme of modern English?
> 
> 
> I could ask whether it stands in opposition to any other phoneme, i.e. if 
> you replaced the shwa-sound in a word with another vowel, would you get 
> another word? If this does not happen, I would then argue that the shwa 
> is not a phoneme in its own right but an allophone of one or more 
> phonemes, e.g. /e/, /a/, /o/ etc.
> 
> 

Hmmm - which would you choose for about, china?  Anything but /@/
sounds quite odd to me.

The classic shibboleth is epic-epoch /Ep"Ik/-/Ep"@k/
(ignoring the /i"pAk'/ variant for the latter.)

These are only weakly distinguished in my variety of English.

As an aside, In my variety of Engish /@/ sees service as both a stressed
and an unstressed vowel, as in abut.  In BE these vowels are not viewed
as a pair, but the statement is true for words like "worker" /w@:k"@/,
is it not? 

I presume the original question concerned only unstressed vowels.
Forestalling the "schwa is by definition unstressed" thread,
it seems to me that that is language-dependent. It's true
for many European languages, but not English.  It seems more
economical to use a vowel symbol to represent vowel color
and let stress be separately represented.

-- 
R.T.Edwards rte@elmo.att.com 908 576-3031
