The schwa sound /ə/ in fORget, fORgive, cOrrupt, cAreer, cOrrect, cOllect, and pERhaps

How to pronounce these words correctly with the schwa /ə/ in the first syllable

Over the years, in my English classes, I’ve always treated the schwa sound /ə/ as insignificant in a syllable; and it is truly insignificant. Insignificant in the sense that you shouldn’t make an effort to pronounce it audibly, it cannot carry any stress, it is soo weak and almost imperceptible, and sometimes not articulating the sound at all is actually allowed.

Why is it called schwa? One of the earliest known instances of the word schwa in English came in 1895 from German. It came into German from the Hebrew shewa, which literally means “emptiness.” The same word in Hebrew also refers to a mark added to a letter—a diacritic—to note an /ə/-like vowel or no vowel at all.

—www.dictionary.com

However, as insignificant and empty we may believe it is, failure to recognize that a syllable carries the schwa often results in a bad pronunciation. For instance, pronouncing fORget as /fOget/ as in the /ɒ/ in pot /pɒt/ is wrong.

Furthermore, failure to recognize that syllabic consonants such as m, l, and n, also have the schwa sound will also lead to a mispronunciation of words like fatal, sandal, terrible, bottle, total, local, panel, channel etc. I wrote in one of my newsletters

that the essence of syllabic consonants is to avoid saying BU in terrible, KUN in spoken, TAL in fatal, NEL in channel, panel or colonel /ˈkəːn(ə)l/, TU in kettle or bottle, DEL in model and DENT in student. I hope you get what I’m driving at here.

You can read it here…

Syllabic consonants /m/, /l/ and /n/

Following the nature of schwa, we can correctly pronounce words such as fORget, fORgive, cOrrupt, cAreer, cOrrect, cOllect, and pERhaps and many other words (police, protect, etc) with the schwa on the first syllable.

Imagine that the word forget, and other words, does not have OR, and it is written like /f’get/ and others forgive as /f’giv/, correct as /k’rekt/ and like that. Avoid saying KORekt, or FORgive and make the schwa almost imperceptible. Yes, that’s it! Well done.

At this point, if you can correctly pronounce all these words fORget, fORgive, cOrrupt, cAreer, cOrrect, cOllect, and pERhaps, I must say that I’m proud of you.

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Yours in English,

Francis