A Rebel Schwa

I recently noticed a bumper sticker on a car that read (rebəl).

My first thought was that the car must belong to a rebel phonetician.

This phonetician obviously rebels by using parentheses instead of backslashes and by combining International Phonetic Alphabet symbols with standard English orthography (if it wasn't for the schwa I might not have even noticed).

Little did I know, there is a Christian rapper named Lecrea and (rebəl), spelled as such, is the title of one of his albums.



By the way, here is the complete phonetic transcription of the word rebel:

/rɛbəl/

Introducing Scwhazam - A Portmanteau Superhero

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Thank you Fussy.

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Schwas

susanohanian.org

Phonemetry - The Schwa

Phoneme + Poetry = poetry about phonemes

A curvaceous young phoneme called schwa
Said "I never feel strong. It's bizarre!
I'm retiring and meek
And I always sound weak
But in frequency counts - I'm the star!"

from One Stop English

I saw this poem while looking for additional IPA resources for my students. I immediately fell in love with it and thought I would share it with my readers.

P.S. The portmanteau is my creation.

We All Make Mistakes - McCain's Schwa

I never claimed to be perfect though I did commit an error that I am a bit embarrassed about. In my post comparing Obama's name to McCain's I stated that McCain's name has only one vowel sound - WRONG. In fact, McCain's name includes the most common American English vowel sound - the schwa. When verbalizing the "Mc" portion of his name there is clearly a schwa (also called a reduced vowel) between the /m/ and the /k/. The schwa occurs in unstressed syllables because when a syllable is not stressed the vowel sound in that syllable is reduced. Interestingly, because any vowel sound can occur in an unstressed syllable and therefore be reduced there are 43 different spellings for the schwa.