6
votes
Can the schwa sound predict spelling?
Absolutely not. Pronunciation never determines spelling in English. Spelling has its own ancient history, one far removed from any attempt to encode pronunciation.
There are all schwas:
Alan
...
- 136k
5
votes
What exactly is the "schwa" sound?
You have a good ear. In fact, for many speakers, the vowels in "Rosa's" and "roses" are not identical on average. It may be misleading to transcribe them with the same symbol "ə".
You might find the ...
- 84k
4
votes
Correct Choice of First Vowel in Words Such as "Regret" and "Return"
No, you can't pronounce these vowels as /ɛ/.That would sound completely alien to a native speaker. /i/ is the normal British pronunciation; in American English, /ə/ is also frequently heard in regret ...
- 3,674
4
votes
Correct Choice of First Vowel in Words Such as "Regret" and "Return"
Lexical sets (e.g.: FLEECE, DRESS, KIT ...) might be provided ... but that only works for stressed vowels, and those are not stressed vowels, which means they're reduced, which means everyone will say ...
3
votes
Is hilarious pronounced /hɪˈlɛriəs/?
The difference between /ɪ/ and /ə/ in unaccented syllables is of very little importance in English. There are some people who use /ə/ instead of /ɪ/ in unaccented syllables (this is called the weak ...
- 89.6k
3
votes
Why is the "A" in some adverbs silenced?
In a comment, John Lawler wrote:
It's not just the "A"; it's any unstressed vowel, however it's spelled. Unstressed vowels can be spelled with any vowel letter, since letters don't determine sounds,...
2
votes
Can the schwa sound predict spelling?
The schwa predicts the spelling to some extent, although highly inconsistent in most cases.
Hanna et al. (1966) found that phoneme to grapheme correspondence is dependent upon the position of the ...
- 1,184
2
votes
Can the schwa sound predict spelling?
The other answers answer the question I think, but just as regards to "separate", it is possible that people who misspell it aren't predicting an "e" from the schwa sound (after all, Boondoggle's data ...
- 2,161
2
votes
Correct Choice of First Vowel in Words Such as "Regret" and "Return"
The 'E' in words like "return" and the first 'E' of "regret" sound more frequently than not, like the 'i' in "kit" or a schwa. But doubtlessly, there has to be a few ...
- 59
2
votes
Is the /jʊɹ/ phoneme being streamlined to /jɚ/ in General American?
I also noticed that many words like POOR and TOUR have the /ʊɹ/ phoneme increasingly streamlined to /ɔɹ/.
The situation with "pour," at least, is the straightforward result of of the pour-...
- 19.3k
1
vote
Is hilarious pronounced /hɪˈlɛriəs/?
phonemic /ə/ ≠ phonetic [ə]
I realize this may well strike you as an outrageous proposition, but your
fundamental mistake lies in somehow believing that dictionaries contain actual phonetic
...
- 136k
1
vote
Why is the "A" in some adverbs silenced?
It's rarely mandatory to pronounce -ally as one syllable
In the word "magically", we do not pronounce the "a"
Not necessarily. As Michael Harvey said in a comment, some speakers ...
- 84k
1
vote
Can the schwa sound predict spelling?
In some accents, schwa is less likely to be written with "i" or "y"
This depends partly on one's accent. Some accents maintain a somewhat (although not entirely) stable phonemic ...
- 84k
1
vote
When to reduce and when not to reduce a vowel ([ɪ] & [i])
Word-final position is special. Full vowel reduction to schwa doesn't occur in general for word-final unstressed vowels, but there are special neutralizations that apply in this context.
The most ...
- 84k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible