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>"In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound". And yet, there's literally no way to represent the most common vowel sound in English. Instead, it's 6 diff

>"In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound". And yet, there's literally no way to represent the most common vowel sound in English. Instead, it's 6 different ways that heavily depend on context, using letters that have no relation to the sound to begin with. I watched a video about this recently I found fascinating, I'll link to it below, but to summarize: the schwa isn't a letter because it occurs only in certain stress positions of a word, which changes depending on the surrounding words. But notice when you "talk slowly", that is, fixate on each and every word, you actually don't pronounce the shwa very often, if at all. Couldn't find the video but it turns out there are a million on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_WJAQ9fus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_WJAQ9fus

illiarian 4y ago
> I'll link to it below, but to summarize: the schwa isn't a letter because Doesn't matter. You claimed English is so much better at representing sounds than other languages. And yet, it cannot represent the most common one. And of course, shwa is just one of them. As I mentioned before, English has significantly more sounds than letters, and of course cannot represent most of them even if those exist when you "soeak slowly". More over, its so poor in expressing these sounds that it re-uses and repurposes completely different letter combinations for the same sound. Or the same letter for completely different sounds. Because of course get/gist and use/you and fashion/mission/faction show us not the poor expressiveness of the language but how wonderfully rich it is in representing the different sounds.