English spelling is really hard to learn.
Because history.
The examples that are usually used to demonstrate that are things like
the o-u-g-h words: cough, through, dough, and so on.
But there are other reasons too, and one of them involves this.
It’s a character so important to English that it has its own name:
“schwa”.
To explain it, let’s start by talking about this letter.
What does that sound like?
In school, we’re taught the name of it, /eɪ/.
And, sure, it can sound like that, in words like “later”.
But you’re actually making two separate vowel sounds there:
/eɪ/.
“Later”.
Sometimes kids are taught this letter as just /æ/.
And it can sound like that too, in words like “cash”.
But it can also be the /ɔː/ in “call”.
And depending on your accent,
and I’ve got to sound really posh to make this work,
it could also be the /ɑ/ in “bath”.
That’s really at the back of the mouth,
it sounds completely unnatural for me.
But! This letter can also sound like the /ə/ in “about”.
And that sound, /ə/, is the one we’re interested in here.
Linguists have a chart, part of the International Phonetic Alphabet, to talk about vowel sounds:
and it goes all the way from a vowel like /i/,
which is produced with the highest bit of your tongue near the front of your mouth,
tongue really close to the roof,
to /ɑ/, highest bit of the tongue at the back, not close to the roof.
/i…ɑ/.
If you study linguistics, then your first few lessons of phonetics are basically just
a group of people all making the same weird sounds
and then trying to understand what the bits of their mouth are actually doing.
Someone usually tries to poke around to feel where their tongue is
and nearly makes themselves throw up.
Anyway, sitting right in the middle of that chart is that /ə/ from “about”.
Represented by the “schwa”.
It is central, everything just kind of sitting in the middle,
it’s the vowel that requires the least effort.
/ə/ is the vowel you use when you’ve got to make a sound but don’t know what to say.
“Uhh…”
So yes, schwa is the A in “about”, but it's also the E in “petition”.
The last I in “definite”. The first O in “potato”.
And the U in “support”.
I said English spelling was a mess.
No wonder that “definate” with an A is such a common misspelling:
if you don’t know that it has the same root as ‘finite’,
it’s fair to think that it’s spelled that way.
That schwa sound, defin-uh-t gives you very little information about what letters to use.
So what’s the difference between those two words?
Well, in “finite”, there’s stress on “nite”.
But in “definite” we don’t stress that syllable anymore, so it gets reduced.
Meaning that its vowel gets reduced to schwa, the least-effort vowel sound.
Every vowel letter in English, A, E, I, O, U, is capable of being reduced to schwa.
Not always, but they’re capable of it.
Sometimes, vowels like that are reduced so much
that they disappear entirely, in words like these.
Your dialect may be different, of course,
and if you pronounce the words on their own, there may still be something there.
But give me a story to read out about a “sep’rate choc’late cam’ra”,
and there’s no schwa in the middle of any of those.
Vowels get reduced even further in quickly-spoken, slurred sentences.
So, the formal way to pronounce this sentence would be:
“I’m Going To Go To The Store.”
But in real life, in my accent,
if I was just saying that to a friend as I was headed out the house,
I’d reduce it to something like:
[at half speed] /ə̃mə̃nəgʌʔɾəðə stɔː/
Almost every vowel in there was schwa.
There was a bit of stress on ‘go’, a bit of effort went in there.
And “store” couldn’t get reduced to /stə/.
But other than that, it was all schwa.
“I’m Going To” was reduced to /ə̃mə̃nə/.
American speakers might reduce it differently to either /a͡imə/ or /əmə/.
That’s not lazy, that’s not wrong, that’s just how language works.
We all convert between those reduced vowels and fully-spelled-out words instinctively,
although it’s something that people learning English aren’t always taught:
they often have to pick it up by themselves.
And that’s one of the reasons why,
when occasionally, when you get these well-meaning spelling reformers who say
“well, every word should just be spelled how it sounds”,
they haven’t thought it through.
There are loads of English words that have more than one pronunciation:
not just because of accent,
but because most of the time, we reduce the vowels to schwa.
Thanks to my co-authors, Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.
Gretchen has a great podcast called Lingthusiasm, the link is in the description.