Transcript Episode 44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowel
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowel. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 44 show notes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about schwa and stress. First, we made our LingComm grant goal! We’re now giving out three grants to linguistics communication projects. The deadline for those applications is the 1st of June wherever you are, which is very soon, so make sure to get those applications in. That’s 2020, in case you’re listening from the future.
Lauren: We’re actually giving out four. We are giving out more than we originally planned, thanks to Claire Bowern funding a fourth LingComm grant on a project that looks at minoritised languages.
Gretchen: Those grant applications are due on June 1st, 2020. If you’re interested in applying for that, go to the website lingcomm.org. That’s “comm” with two Ms. You’ll see all the details there.
Lauren: If you’re listening to this deep in the future, you can go to lingcomm.org to see what great projects we funded.
Gretchen: Indeed you can.
Lauren: We now have new Lingthusiasm merch. We have little badges for you to wear through Redbubble, which is really exciting. They’re super cute.
Gretchen: Interesting! I think I would call those “pins” or maybe “buttons.” Whatever you call them, they are round circular things that you can pin on your clothes or backpacks that say fun linguistics things on them.
Lauren: Hm. I’d call them “button badges” as well.
Gretchen: I think “buttons” is kind of ambiguous because you don’t know if that’s a kind of button you use that you sew into your clothing or that you pin into your clothing. Maybe I like “pins”? Anyway, you can get these at lingthusiasm.com/merch along with more sticker designs and other Lingthusiasm merch like scarves with the International Phonetic Alphabet on them and other fun things like that.
Lauren: This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about numbers. We look at different counting systems, different number systems, and what using your fingers to count says about you. You can get access to this and 38 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Gretchen: Okay. I have a puzzle for us.
Lauren: Awesome. I love a puzzle.
Gretchen: I’m gonna give you a few words, then you can tell me what they have in common. Our words are “about.”
Lauren: “About.”
Gretchen: “Broken.”
Lauren: “Broken.”
Gretchen: And “council.”
Lauren: “Council.”
Gretchen: Any thoughts for what they have in common?
Lauren: My immediate thought was I’m sad we don’t have Lingthusiasm think time music.
Gretchen: We do have theme music. Maybe we could play it a bit again.
Lauren: Hm. Ah. “About, broken, council” – they all start with different letters. They all have different letters in them. I’m assuming it’s not something about what they mean. They’re all two syllables long.
Gretchen: That’s true. I should give you a couple more examples that also have this thing in common to see if that helps.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: We have “about, broken, council, potato,” and “support.”
Lauren: Oh, “potato.” The goes my two-syllable theory. Definitely nothing semantic about their meaning. They still all have completely different letters. You’ve actually made it harder with more data, Gretchen. Harder. That’s not useful.
Gretchen: The thing we wanna think about is not just what letters are in them but what sounds are in them.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: Is there any sound that all five of these words have in common?
Lauren: If I look at the spelling, they all have completely different vowels. They don’t even have the same vowels. But if I listen to how they’re spoken, think about “about, broken,” and “council,” [Gasp] “potato,” and “support,” they all have schwa.
Gretchen: They all have schwa, which I know is your favourite vowel. I have created this quiz just for you.
Lauren: Excellent. Thank you so much. They all have this /ə/ sound. It’s the coolest little letter that doesn’t exist as a written letter in English. It’s one of the coolest sounds in English. I love it. We’re doing a whole episode. It’s schwa time.
Gretchen: It’s schwa time. So, /əbɑʊt/ has that /ə/ in the first syllable. /bɹoʊkən/ has that /ə/ in the second syllable. /kɑʊnsəl/ has that /ə/ there – /pətɛɪtoʊ/ /səpoɹt/. There’s the /ə/ going all the way through. Here’s your second quiz. There’s a special thing about this particular set of five words. They all have schwa in them, but they all have something else that’s different about them.
Lauren: They’re all spelt with the actual different vowels. When I learnt that schwa was the sound that hid across all of the vowels – it doesn’t matter what one you write, if it’s in an unstressed syllable, and we’ll talk about that, it becomes a schwa – it explained to me why I find writing some words so difficult. If you don’t know how to spell “potato” and someone says /pətɛɪtoʊ/, that could be a P-A, that could be a P-U. It’s really hard to tell. But all of those are written with different vowels but sound the same in speech.
Gretchen: Yeah! You get words like /dɛfənɪtli/, which was one of these words that I didn’t know how to spell for the longest time. It would give me this red underline and I was like, “Why? This looks totally reasonable to me!” Then, I had to learn that the schwa – /dɛfənɪtli/ – the schwa there wasn’t spelled with an A, it was spelled with an I. You really can’t tell in English because every single vowel letter can represent this particular vowel sound, which is really frustrating when you’re a kid learning how to spell and yet is really cool when you’re a linguist because it’s one of these mysterious things that once you notice it, it’s everywhere. Yet, you can go your whole life without noticing it.
Lauren: We talked about all the vowels back in Episode 17 with vowel gymnastics and how, unlike consonants, vowels exist in this space and they all shift around like a multi-dimensional slide trombone. I guess that’s why we went with “gymnastics” as an analogy instead of “multi-dimensional trombones.”
Gretchen: I mean, if someone wants to design a multi-dimensional trombone for me, I’ll take it.
Lauren: We talked a teeny bit about schwa in that episode, but I have been wanting to do an episode all about schwa for ages. Here we are. Exciting times.
Gretchen: I think we should also mention what schwa looks like when it’s written in the International Phonetic Alphabet because it is part of your icon or your whole icon on various different websites, is it not?
Lauren: Yes. If you’ve ever seen the upside-down E looking thing that is the Superlinguo logo, that is the sch – so schwa is interesting in that it has a name. It also has, like all of the vowels, a representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet. That representation looks like an upside-down E. I’m not normally one of these people that has lots of opinions about fonts, but when it comes to how it’s written, it is not an upside-down E. This is something I’m very fussy about.
Gretchen: What is the difference between a schwa and an upside-down lowercase E? Please tell the class because I don’t know.
Lauren: If you turn it back up the other way, it looks really unproportioned. It’s like the top of the E is just way too high up. It looks all weirdly stretched.
Gretchen: So, the thicknesses of the letters and so on are weirdly stretched? Is that the thing?
Lauren: Yeah. The height of that little loopy bit of the E, if you turn it back the other way and try and use it as an E, looks a bit – it just makes it look like the E is gonna fall over. It’s really wobbly.
Gretchen: Okay. I feel like we need to point this out that you know this because you made schwa cookie cutters.
Lauren: Yes. I designed and 3-D printed a schwa cookie cutter a few years ago for Christmas gingerbread.
Gretchen: Then, a very helpful person on the internet said, “Couldn’t you just have used an E cookie cutter and turned the cookies upside-down?” and you were like, “No, no, no, because the thickness is different.”
Lauren: No. You absolutely cannot.
Gretchen: I feel like, historically speaking, it probably was an upside-down E though because I know a lot of the IPA symbols are upside-down versions or rotated versions of existing letters because that way they didn’t have to typeset new letters back in the metal printing days. But I believe you that, now that we have digital formats, schwa can have slightly different line thicknesses.
Lauren: Yes. It has its own representation. It has a name that not many other vowels have names. Technically, it’s a mid-central vowel, which just means it’s just in the centre. It’s not high. It’s not low. It’s not front. It’s not back. It’s not any of these dimensions that we talk about. It’s just the most /ə/ vowel that exists, which is why everything ends up going towards it when it’s not stressed because it’s the least exciting thing to do with your mouth. There’s actually a Wikipedia entry for the mid-central vowel – that /ə/ vowel – but schwa is so iconic there’s also a separate Wikipedia page just to talk about it as “schwa.” This is how strong its brand is.
Gretchen: Schwa’s brand is strong. Especially for the vowels, normally if we talk about vowels, we talk about /i/ or /ɛ/ or /ʊ/. You just say the name of the vowel – or sometimes people say the name of the symbol. Like, “small cap I” or –
Lauren: “Open O.”
Gretchen: “Open O” or something like this. Schwa has got this name that doesn’t refer to the shape of its symbol, it’s got its own name. The thing that’s always tormented me about the name “schwa” is, like, it’s a cool name. I will grant you this. But it doesn’t have schwa itself in the name.
Lauren: This is true and very disappointing.
Gretchen: Other symbols, like “theta” – /θɛɪtʌ/ has a theta in it. Great. We’re doing a great job. Good job, theta. Schwa does not have a schwa in it, and I find that kind of disappointing.
Lauren: Disappointing.
Gretchen: However, I looked up the history of the name “schwa.” Apparently, “schwa” used to have a schwa in it and then it stopped, which I now think is even better. The word “schwa” is from the Hebrew /ʃva/ for which the classical pronunciation was apparently /ʃəwa/.
Lauren: Ah, so before modern Hebrew, it had a schwa in it. It was like /ʃəwa/?
Gretchen: Exactly. /ʃwa/, /ʃəwa/ – maybe we should start calling it /ʃəwa/ because then it would have a /ʃəwa/ in it.
Lauren: Amazing. I think one of the things I like about the name of schwa is that the name itself encapsulates its history.
Gretchen: Yeah. Initially /ʃva/ or /ʃəwa/ is the name of one of the sets of dots that indicates this sound – because Hebrew writing, along with Arabic, are normally written with just the consonants. Then, if you want to indicate what the vowels are, you can add these extra little dots and bits above and below the consonants which, most of the time, aren’t used but are sometimes used for children or for contexts where you wanna be super precise. One of the names of these sets of dots indicating the vowels is /ʃəwa/, which was used to indicate either the /ə/ sound, the schwa sound itself, or /ɛɪ/, which in most languages the /ɛɪ/ sound is written with what English calls a letter E. If you think of the /ɛː/ as in /kæfɛɪ/ or /foɹtɛɪ/, those Es are that /ɛɪ/ sound. This kind of explains to me why it’s an upside-down E and not an upside-down literally any other vowel because every vowel letter can become a schwa sound because in this origin it could be used for either one of these two sounds.
Lauren: Nifty. Even though it’s pronounced /ʃva/ in modern Hebrew, the spelling of “schwa” itself is actually from the German spelling for it. I think this was one of the reasons I like the name “schwa” is that it encapsulates its history being borrowed from Hebrew orthography. Then, in the 19th Century, a lot of German linguists used it for that sound. That S-C-H spelling is the German spelling rather than any other language. Most satisfyingly, it was first used by a guy called Schmeller who has his name spelt S-C-H as well.
Gretchen: Johann Andreas Schmeller, who also used the schwa. Maybe that’s why he liked it.
Lauren: It became big in the 19th Century and definitely by the end of the 19th Century/Early 20th Century it was being used in texts to represent that sound.
Gretchen: Schwa is also very common in German. A lot of words that end in E in German have that E pronounced as a schwa. The name what in English would be Gabe – the German name /gaːbə/ – that /ə/ at the end is also a schwa.
Lauren: It definitely pops up in a lot of languages because it’s quite efficient.
Gretchen: You also get this optional schwa sound with Es at the end of the word in French. You can have /lɔ̃ːg/ but also /lɔ̃ːgə/, which is the word for “long.” There’s an E there that can be optionally pronounced. When it is pronounced, it’s pronounced kind of like schwa. This gets to something interesting because German and French have these schwas that are spelled with the letter E at the end of a lot of their words. English, instead, has these completely silent Es at the end of a lot of its words.
Lauren: The bane of all children learning to read in English – the silent E.
Gretchen: Oooh, “bane.” There’s an example! Words like “bane” and “fame” and “fine” and “bone” and “meme” – that one is not one that I learned when I was in Grade 4 spelling class. There’re all these words that end in silent E in English. The rule that I learned when I was in Grade 5 spelling class was the silent E makes the vowel say its own name.
Lauren: Oh, I like that. I never learnt that. That’s very handy, trying to get your head around the rules of reading English.
Gretchen: Yeah. It’s really nice.
Lauren: I’m really jealous that I never learnt that very efficient way of thinking about what E was doing.
Gretchen: But it’s a rule that’s kind of unsatisfying to me as a linguist now because why should adding an extra vowel to the end of the word change how the vowel in the middle of the word is being pronounced? That’s something that I found unsatisfying as a budding linguist. What sort of process is that?
Lauren: I am going – I mean, I know the answer. But if I had not known the answer, I would’ve taken a wild guess at it being retrospectively attempting to make sense of a historical process by pretending that there’s some kind of reason for it.
Gretchen: I mean, that’s not not what’s going on.
Lauren: The reason why they had to retrospectively come up with this rule is because the E used to be pronounced. It used to be pronounced as our friend schwa. They weren’t just one syllable words. The were two syllable words. It was /banə/ – “bane” – and /famə/ and /hamə/.
Gretchen: Oh, so the schwa actually used to be pronounced there. You’d get, instead of “fine,” like /fɪnə/. Instead of “fame,” /famə/. Instead of “home,” /hoʊmə/ or something like that.
Lauren: Yes. You had two syllables instead of one syllable that we have now for “fine,” “fame,” “home.” Those syllables started with a consonant, ended with a vowel. Then, over time, that schwa comes off at the end. It’s not as easy to always pronounce it – a bit like with the French example. In French at the moment, you can pronounce it, or you don’t have to. It’s starting to erode away at the end of a word. That was the process that happened in English.
Gretchen: Right. This is really interesting because in English and in other Germanic languages as well there’s a difference between the kinds of vowels that you can have in a syllable where there’s a consonant at the end and in a syllable where there isn’t. We have English words “hid” and “hide,” which have /ɪ/ and /ɑɪ/ in them both between H and D. But there’s a word like “hi,” but there isn’t a word in English /hɪ/ or /fɪ/ or /kɪ/ or /mɪ/ even though all of these can be perfectly good as long as there’s another consonant in them.
Lauren: This is where the rules of English syllables interact with the rules of what sounds can go into them. We used to have two syllables in words like “fine” and “fame,” and now we have one. That little E sits there to remind us as a written fossil even though we don’t pronounce it anymore.
Gretchen: It reminds us that the vowel that’s in this first syllable, which is now the only syllable, is the kind that can exist without a consonant after it. Because we can have a word like /hɑɪ/ and not a word like /hɪ/, if there’s that E at the end – you have /hɑɪd/ or something – then that reminds us – and by “us” I mean people who know this history, which is not most modern contemporary English speakers – that this is the kind of word that has the vowel that can exist in open syllables.
Lauren: For the rest of us, it’s just a handy way to spell properly.
Gretchen: There was a special reason why it was schwa that was so easily lost at the end of all of these words like “fine” and “home” and “hide.” That’s because schwa is what’s known as a “reduced vowel.” It’s physically produced for a shorter amount of time than a full vowel like /ɑɪ/ or /i/ or even /ɪ/.
Lauren: It’s what allows us to just sneak it in really quickly in syllables that we’re not really focusing on.
Gretchen: If we produce some syllables faster or quieter than other ones, those faster or quieter symbols tend to also have schwas.
Lauren: This is why schwa crops up in all of these words regardless of what vowel they’re spelt with. I’m pretty sure Lauren who really struggled to spell words because she couldn’t distinguish the vowel because it was being pronounced with schwa when she was learning to spell would’ve said, “Why don’t we just spell all the words with schwa and be done with it?” That wouldn’t be the most practical solution.
Gretchen: The problem is, if we respell English to be consistent and every time we say schwa we write schwa, it works in the short term because we have this transparent relationship between the sound and spelling, which is nice. But the annoying thing – this fact that you can write any English vowel letter for the sound schwa – is also a fact about the structure of English. There are all these words that are related to each other where we can see that relationship more clearly based on the spelling than we can sometimes with the pronunciation. The spelling can help us notice when words are related to each other. If we take up a word pair like “acid” and “acidity” –
Lauren: “Acid” and “acidity.” Well, that -ity bit on the end of “acid” that turns it into “acidity” also changes the vowel to a schwa.
Gretchen: Yeah. /æsɪd/ and /əsɪdəti/ – in the first one we have /æ/ as the first vowel and in the second one we have /ə/. Yet, it still seems pretty intuitive that these words are related to each other. It’s just that when we do have this -ity on the end, we pronounce the main word – instead of /æsɪd/, we say /əsɪd/.
Lauren: It would be inconvenient in the even medium turn to lose the relationship between, say, “courage” and “courageous” just because we have that -ous on the end of “courageous.”
Gretchen: It’s the same thing there. /kʌɹəd͡ʒ/ – the second syllable -age, there’s a schwa. But /kʌɹɛɪd͡ʒəs/ – now there’s a different vowel there. It’s just because we’ve added the -ous on the end. Yet, it’s nice that these two words that are very clearly related to each other still look the same.
Lauren: I guess it’s particularly true as well of those word pairs in English that only differ because of stress. Like /ˈɹɛˌkəɹd/ and /ˌɹəˈkoɹd/ – only different because of stress. Then, we’d be spelling them differently because each one has a schwa in the opposite place.
Gretchen: /ˈɹɛˌkəɹd/ – the schwa is in the /-əɹd/. /ˌɹəˈkoɹd/ – your schwa is in the /ɹə-/. You’d have to /ʃwap/ the – swap the [stutters] /ʃwaz/ – /ʃwap/ the /ʃwʌz/? Wow. That’s really hard to say. Swap the schwas. You wouldn’t know what vowel to recover from the syllable once you started stressing it. It’s the same thing with -ity and -ous. When you make “acid” into “acidity” and “courage” into “courageous,” instead of stressing the /æ/ and the /kəɹ/, you’re stressing the /ɪd/ and the /æd͡ʒ/, if you will.
Lauren: Adding the extra bit to the word shifts where the stress is.
Gretchen: It’s these unstressed syllables where schwa – not every unstressed syllable in English is a schwa, but a heck of a lot of them are.
Lauren: I think we’ll keep the spelling system as it is.
Gretchen: This was something that always used to come up for me back when I used to teach Intro to Linguistics. People would be trying to write things in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the very first time, so they’d go through each word, and they’d say it really slowly and carefully. What that would mean is that instead of saying /əsɪdəti/, they’d say something like /æsɪdɪti/. Okay. Or, instead of saying /kʌɹəd͡ʒ/, /kʌɹɛɪd͡ʒəs/, they’d have /kʌɹɛɪd͡ʒʌs/, /kʌɹɹɛd͡ʒ/.
Lauren: They’ve gone back to stressing every syllable, so the schwas evaporate.
Gretchen: Right! They’d write these words and they’d have no schwas in them all over the place. You’d have to say, “You can say this word like this -- if you’re really saying it slowly and carefully, and you were saying each syllable at once maybe to help someone spell it, you do have the full vowel there some level,” psychologically, for a lot of people, especially because of the spelling that’s influencing you to tell you it’s there. But in normal speech at a regular pace, most of the time you do say schwas a lot. It’s an interesting tension where many of our schwas actually represent a sound that we could recover if you say the word slowly and carefully enough, which is also a reason to keep the spelling where it is because there is some psychological reality to the non-schwa version as well.
Lauren: This discussion is very English-focused, I should say, because it’s something that English seems to do in particular in terms of having this kind of stress and this reducing to schwa on unstressed syllables. In fact, it’s a fairly prominent feature of the English accent. I imagine it’s something that gets transferred when English speakers are learning to speak other languages. It’s probably the closest I’ve come to having the ability to understand what the English accent in other languages must sound like to native speakers of those languages. They must just think that we’re failing to hear vowels all over the place.
Gretchen: “Why do all of your vowels become the same vowel?” I think the inverse is also the case is that it’s one of the trickiest things for people who are learning English from a language that doesn’t do this, which is most of them, to do is be constantly trying to hit this vowel that I don’t even have. “Don’t you want your vowels to all be very distinct from each other?” Schwa or not schwa is this very English thing. The stress part about it being very important which syllable’s stressed and which part of which word is stressed – that’s also a very English thing. I find the most interesting place to notice how important stress is in English is when it comes to poetry.
Lauren: Sure. Because a lot of poetry relies on having certain numbers of syllables. Using stress is one way to explore the rhythm of a poem or a poetic construction.
Gretchen: Right. Some of the oldest English Mother Goose rhymes, nursery rhymes, have a consistent number of stressed bits per line rather than a consistent number of syllables. If you have something like “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.” There’s three stress bits per line, but the number of syllables is quite different. The same thing with limericks in English, it’s not that there’s the same number of syllables in each line, it’s that the stress pattern is you have to have three stressed syllables, three stressed syllables, two stress, two stress, three stress. You can do that with a varying number of actual syllables in it. Something like, “There once was a man from Nantucket,” three stresses – “once,” “man,” “tuck.” Nine syllables. But “A tutor who tooted the flute,” also three stress – “tu,” “too,” “flute.” That’s eight syllables. And “A wonderful bird is the pelican,” ten syllables but still three stresses.
Lauren: It’s funny. My brain is so tuned to listening to the stress in these, I actually found it hard to count the syllables as you were going because I was so tuned into the limerick structure of stress.
Gretchen: A lot of very English-y poetry styles, as long as you get the stress right, you can really mess with the syllables because English pays a lot of attention to the stress. Whereas, in French, they don’t have this individual, unpredictable stress at the word level the way English does at all. There’s no /ˈɹɛˌkəɹd/ versus /ˌɹəˈkoɹd/ in French. Everything just gets a bit of stress at the end of the phrase or sentence or utterance or whatever you’re saying. You might say something like “Bonjour,” but you could also say, “Bonjour, comment ça va?” and you just stress the “jour” or the “va.” You don’t have to go anywhere in between and stress anything else. This means that French poetry can’t do this stress counting thing because there’s no stresses for them to count.
Lauren: Ah. Normally, I spend a lot of time going, “Oh, poor English speakers. They’re missing out.” But poor French speakers! They’re missing out on limericks.
Gretchen: I really don’t know how you do a limerick in French. I think you’d have to pick a number of syllables that is approximately equivalent and just do that.
Lauren: We talked about this schwa-syllable relationship being very English-focused for this episode, but it’s not the only language in which schwa appears and is a little bit easy to drop once you have reduced the pronunciation of schwa. French was one example you had. In Indo-Aryan languages as well – these are the languages of the same Into-European family as English but they’re over on the Indian subcontinent, so Hindi. I know about this because I had to learn Nepali. They have schwa as a vowel. A bit like the Hebrew writing system, for this vowel in particular, they just don’t write it down. You have to know when to pronounce this vowel by memorising. For some languages in the family it’s just gone altogether. It’s another example of how schwa in some languages can be really eroded. But not in all languages.
Gretchen: This is actually true in Miꞌkmaq as well, which is an Algonquian language spoken in Eastern Canada. In their writing system they use the apostrophe to represent the schwa sound, but the apostrophe is only added when the schwa is quote-unquote “unpredictable.” If you can predict the schwa, then you just put in the schwa where you know it’s supposed to go because as a speaker you say it. Of course, I am not very good – I don’t speak Miꞌkmaq so I’m not particularly good at predicting where it goes.
Lauren: Unpredictable schwa is almost cooler than unstressed schwa.
Gretchen: You can kind of predict it. Speakers actually know how to do it properly, but it’s not always represented in the writing system which is, I guess, something it has in common with Nepali.
Lauren: Schwa has so many cheeky personalities.
Gretchen: Schwa also shows up in English – speaking of being cheeky – as the vowel sound that people end up producing, if you’re an English speaker, when you’re trying not to make any vowel sound at all. If you’re trying to say the sound that the letter B makes, but you don’t wanna say B, you just wanna say that sound by itself, you probably end up with /bə/, which is still a vowel, it’s just schwa. Because that’s the least vowel you can make.
Lauren: Just adding a little bit so you can get that /bə/ across.
Gretchen: Yeah. It also shows up sometimes in people’s names. I knew somebody called /ksɛnjə/ and a lot of English speakers couldn’t pronounce that /ksə/, the KS, at the beginning of her name, so a lot of people ended up saying /kəsɛnjə/ by inserting a little schwa between because that was how they were able to keep both the K and the S.
Lauren: Very handy. Although, I like unpredictable schwa in Miꞌkmaq, one of the best things about schwa popping up in the particular context of unstressed syllables in English means that schwa is set up for being just a really great source of jokes because, when it comes to English, schwa is never stressed. I think that’s a life motto we can all get behind.
Gretchen: This means that there are people who’ve made t-shirts saying, “I want to be a schwa, it’s never stressed.”
Lauren: There’s a great photo from Sandy Abuadas who has made cookies for her students with schwa on them so that her students’ finals will be stressless.
Gretchen: I love it! It’s so good.
Lauren: It was very cute.
Gretchen: I think the stress part – in the technical sense, there’s this very tempting pun with the stress part in the vernacular sense.
Lauren: I think because it’s a sound that is everywhere and ubiquitous but, until you study linguistics, you don’t know that it is all around you. Not only is it around you, but it has its own symbol and it has its own name. I think that’s why it’s a classic linguist iconography to have fun with.
Gretchen: I hope that learning about schwa has not been stressful!
[Music]
Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.
Gretchen: I can be found at @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can get access to over 30 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards. Recent bonus episodes include synaesthesia, numbers, teaching linguistics, and a robo-generated episode of Lingthusiasm. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.
Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
400 of you?!? (and even more friends after last night)
Omg!!! So so so so happy! Thanks to all of the OG’s that’s been here since 2014! And to all the new boos whether you came here to read my shitty writing, to have someone relate to you about being a black person in today’s society, to see another black woman who loves anime on your dash, or just enjoy the thousands of cat videos and memes I reblog consistently, know I LOVE you. 💖💖
PLEASE don’t EVER be afraid to jump in my ask box to talk. I am always here! 💖 I’m still learning and trying to get better with writing since I just started like 3 weeks ago lol BUT as a celebration if y’all wanted, you could pop in the ask box and introduce yourselves! I would love to hear from y’all!
Anywhoooo thank you for being here and listening!
Also special s/o to my soulmate @maximit3 and the harem ladies for helping me to see how AMAZING writing is AND supporting and giving your thoughts because lord knows I never thought I was good enough to write anything let alone publish it in social media. Thanks ladies I love you so much! And I really really look forward to writing more and getting ether at it! @lookslikeleese @rat-suki @baku-no-alt @bakatenshii @enjifuckersupreme @red-riot-girl642 @theygottheircages @yukiimanic @saratour @pomsuki @sanguinekeigo @catsonthebeachfics @blahkugo @zahrashallucinations @lady-bakuhoe
As I was writing that last post I saw a little light move. Like gnat sized. It’s night and there’s no explanation I have. Except of course guardian angels and the like. Reminded me of what I was going to write earlier. Ironically, wrote about my ideal guy, my muse, sunflowers, all that and forgot why I even started that post. The reminder kind of reinforces my theory.
I think, I hope, I believe, I know, that I’m connecting to my twinflame more and more. When I was younger I’d be so full of longing, so sad, so hopeful for the love of my life to finally enter my life and make each other happy. Which, if you know the law of manifestation this only prolonged him being here physically.
Sorry if my writing seems a mess also, I am stupid tired right now.
Anyway, today I had a beautiful thought/reminder that my twinflame is here with me no matter what. If he’s half way across the globe (which many tarot readings suggest), in a relationship (also that), or even had passed on. Abraham hicks had mentioned once that if you are trying to manifest someone, treat them as if they already had passed. Manifesting calls for your desire to stay strong and true, but not to become... fear of loss or lack. Essentially, to love them but not expect them to be physically there here and now.
So I thought about that. If one of my worst fears for the longest time had come true and my twinflame had died long before I could meet him, it’s not actually that bad. His higher self is always a part of me and with me. Alive or not. With all of these signs of sunflowers, I stopped and thought, what if he manifested them for me? Little messages. Consciously or not, my twinflame’s higher self loves me. It’s an uncuttable bond. I’m imagining the life strings in Disney’s Hercules where the fate can’t cut a gods life string. And I love my twinflame too, certainly my higher self does and knows who he is.
I hope that hotty with a body is getting my messages too. Maybe sunflowers. Maybe roses. Maybe ladybugs. Maybe the rain. But I’ll see anything like sunflowers or things that give me that jolt and see it as a gift from him. Like a little “Hey here’s a flower <3″ Ugh man.
So to connect my last post about writing and how it relates to manifesting, I just wanted to say. Hey, I love you, and I know saying it is redundant but I like saying it. And gosh darn if you don’t just make me feel comfortable in my skin. Happy to be here and in love with you. If by some miracle of life you read these posts with your physically real eyes, I just want you to know I cherish the idea of cooking breakfast with you. And I know it’s corny but I’m sleepy. And feeling good, like I should.
I hope the song Sunday Best reaches you. It’s a good vibe I hope you’re picking up on.
