BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?

Subject: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: maire-aine
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 11:38 AM

I looked up a word in the dictionary and it was in the pronunciation. I know what sound it represents, but what's it called? If I wanted to type it, what character do I search for? Thanks,

Maryanne

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 11:45 AM

look here my friend.

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: bobad
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 11:48 AM

As for transcribing it on computer try here http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/phoneticsymbols.pdf

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 11:49 AM

It's called a schwa. It's the sort of anonymous vowel that comes up in many words, sort of a short "uh".

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Monique
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 12:11 PM

Can't you type it in Word, from "Special characters"? It comes at the end of a long row of letters with different diacritics (small rounds, circumflexes, upside down circumflexes, cedillas etc)

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 12:35 PM

My son used to play in a band called "Schwa Ray", which was pronounced "Array". It was a joke that very few people other than language majors got.

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Bill D
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 01:24 PM

It's discussed in this thread

It seems it doesn't show in every font, so you have to specify.

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 03:40 PM

My son used to play in a band called "Schwa Ray", which was pronounced "Array". It was a joke that very few people other than language majors got.
Multilingual pusnsters eh?

Did they go to many evening parties or receptions? Particularly French ones!

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: maire-aine
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 03:41 PM

Thank you, all. "Schwa". That's the word I was looking for. Now that I see it, I remember that I'd heard it before (40 years ago, or so).

Maryanne

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 03:59 PM

I got into trouble when I was about 8 years old for making up a little rule to help me remember the sound the schwa makes.   

A schwa says "uh" like a Squaw says "Ugh". It wasn't that it was unPC (political correctness did not exist in the mid 1960s especially regards Native Americans). It was that I had mentioned it to a fellow student and the eavesdropping teacher thought I was making a joke about the lesson.

Thanks for that unpleasant little trip down bad memories lane.

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 04:28 PM

multilingual punsters eh?

Not necessarilly. I said "language majors", not "foreign language majors". I learned about schwas and such as an English major and English is a language. I assume a phonetics class is part of foreign language majors' degree programs as well.

Phonetics is about sounds, not meanings. A schwa is a schwa, a glottal stop is a glottal stop, and a bilabial fricative is a bilabial fricative, no matter whether you're speaking English, Dutch, or Swahili.

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: GUEST,Slag
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 04:44 PM

Uh, yas! Geo. Ber.nerd Schwa was oft herd to use that un-re.mark.able sound kwite off.Ten, odddly enuff!

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 04:59 PM

"Schwa" is one of those words that people just don't understand, and so they think it's unnecessary and treat you like a leper if you use it. I was shunned by my church choir for three weeks when I tried to explain that something was pronounced with a "schwa."
Er....at least I think that's the reason they shunned me.
-Joe-

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: fumblefingers
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 05:04 PM

You can use the Windows Character map to copy and paste the ə

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Bill D
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 07:36 PM

ə ə

I made those by holding down the 'alt' key and entering '601' on the numeric pad.

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Bill D
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 07:40 PM

If you use a PC (Windows) either of these two programs will give you access to most of the characters & symbols you'd ever want.

I just looked a a bunch of fascinating stuff using Character Map Pro.

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 08:38 PM

Schwa-sheva-shwa are all acceptable spellings.

It came from Hebrew through Greek, and was introduced in 1895.
In the OED (Oxford); that spelling wasn't added until the 1987 supplement. They used the Hebrew sheva and the main entry is still under sheva.
Also Shwa.

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: Peace
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 08:45 PM

The usd 'e' represents the sound made when one says the (not the one people sometimes use--Bob Dylan comes to mind--where 'the' is pronounced 'thee'). It's like the sound 'uh'.

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 28 Dec 08 - 04:19 AM

In Word, if you key Ctl-F9 you should see a funny looking pair of "curly braces" { } with your cursor between them.
Type "seq charnum inside the braces, so it looks like:

{ seq charnum }

With your cursor still between the braces, Hit F9. You will now see "1"

Move to the end of the line (so that you're outside the closing brace) and insert a "tab".

Insert another set of braces (Ctl-F9) and in this set type "seq charnum \c \*HEX" to look like:

{ seq charnum \c \*HEX}

When you hit F9 this time (with the cursor still inside the second pair of braces) you'll see another "1" :

1                1

Once again go to the end of the line and insert a tab followed by &#. IMMEDIATELY after the "#" do another Ctl-F9 to get another pair of braces in which you type "seq charnum \c" and hit F9 again. Right arrow ONCE to get your cursor immediately to the right of where the last closing brace ( } ) was, and type a semicolon ";"

Your line will now look like:

1         1         

Click in the left margin to select the entire line, and Ctl-C to copy it.

Ctl-V about ten times to get ten copies of the line.

Select all ten lines and Ctl-C to copy them.

Hit Ctl-V about ten times to get 100 copies of the line.

Use Ctl-A to select all 100 lines, and hit F9.

You should now see in the left column the numbers 1 through 100.

In the second column you should see the HEX number corresponding to the DECIMAL value in the first column.

In the third column you should see the HTML code for the character whose DECIMAL number is shown in the first column.

Details:

1. Ctl-F9 inserts a "field marker"

2. "seq" tells Word what kind of field. A sequence field (seq) displays a number, and increments it by one each time the same field appears.

3. Each sequence must have a name, so I arbitrarily called it "charno" (for "character number," perhaps)

4. A "\c" tells Word to use the previous value without incrementing

5. The "\* HEX" tells it to display the result in hexadecimal rather than in decimal notation.

6. This works in all recent Word versions, but in Word 2007 the instructions have been EXPUNGED and cannot be found.

Now being able to print the first 100 characters in html isn't too interesting, since the first thrity or so are "non-printing" and the next 70 are just ordinary stuff.

Go back to the FIRST LINE and click in the left margin to highlight (select) just the first line.

Hit Shift-F9 and the "field codes" in that line should be displayed, so that you see:

{ seq charno }         { seq charno \c \*HEX }         &#{seq charno \c };

In the first set of braces, add a "\r384" so that what

WAS: { seq charno }

is NOW: { seq charno \r384 }

6. The "\r384" tells Word to start (restart) numbering the charno sequence at decimal 384.

When this last change is done, do a Ctl-A again to select all of the junk you've entered, and then F9 to "update" the display values for all of these little sequence fields.

After the final update, before posting or pasting elsewhere, you should select all (Ctl-A) and key in a Ctl-Shift-F9 to convert the field result values to plain text.(Once you do this, you can't go back to the field form – it's all just text.)

For display purposes, in the above I've replaced bare "&" with "&" so that the html will display "&" – the actual character you need to type – and not read it as code for a something else. Adding a fourth column with "bare &s" should display the characters coded when the text you've entered is viewed in a browser.

I've also used a bunch of " " strings in lieu of tabs, so the columns may be a bit ragged.

For the 20 consecutive characters beginning at HEX 180, decimal 384:

384     180     ƀ     ƀ
385     181     Ɓ      Ɓ
386     182     Ƃ      Ƃ
387     183     ƃ      ƃ
388     184     Ƅ      Ƅ
389     185     ƅ      ƅ
390     186     Ɔ      Ɔ
391     187     Ƈ      Ƈ
392     188     ƈ      ƈ
393     189     Ɖ      Ɖ
394     18A     Ɗ      Ɗ
395     18B     Ƌ      Ƌ
396     18C     ƌ      ƌ
397     18D     ƍ      ƍ
398     18E     Ǝ      Ǝ
399     18F     Ə      Ə
400     190     Ɛ      Ɛ
401     191     Ƒ      Ƒ
402     192     ƒ      ƒ
403     193     Ɠ      Ɠ

If you don't see all the characters in the fourth "column" it just means that the font you've picked as the default in your browser doesn't have those characters, and you need to choose a different one (if you want to see those characters). In Vista, and probably in WinXP Times New Roman should work, but the same-named font in earlier versions may omit some or all.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 28 Dec 08 - 04:21 AM

OOOOPS:

I named the sequence "charnum" at the beginning, then switched to "charno" later in the instructions. Any name will work as long as it doesn't have spaces or funny characters in it, but of course one has to use the same name throughout.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Phonetics Q: what's an upsidedown e ?
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 28 Dec 08 - 05:12 AM

Joe

shunned by my church choir for three weeks when I tried to explain that something was pronounced with a "schwa."

Try getting a handful of Southern Baptist Choir singers in central VA to sing egg shell cease day o rather than ex cell sis deo.

groan