Question

To me schwa seems to be a variation of different vowel sounds and it actually sounds different depending on vowel that it replaces. For example in words about, along, flower and higher it sounds like short u / ? / and in words like position, circus and pencil it sounds like short i and in words like pepper, player and passenger like the sound e . If this is the case why is schwa always represented by the same phonetic symbol / ? / ?
Furthermore, the words ending with er are pronounced in stressed form with shorter / ?? / but when replaced with schwa in words like pepper and higher the same phonetic symbol is used /?r / . So how is one to distinguish between the stressed vowel and unstressed schwa for words ending with er ?

Pronunciationkaren · Accepted Answer

I am not a phonetician, but I will give you my understanding of your query and maybe it will help (maybe not). I like to imagine the IPA symbols as coordinates on a map. Often the coordinates of the sounds we make in speech are not represented exactly by the coordinates of one of the IPA symbols, but we use the nearest IPA symbol to represent the sound we are making. When I say the word 'pepper', I hear the same schwa sound as in the article 'a' (in weak form) or the word 'circus' but that is my accent. If I pronounce pepper /pep?/, I still understand it to be the word pepper. It may be that in your accent the schwa sound has a similarity to /?/ in 'flower' but more of a similarity to /i/ in 'circus'. As long as the sound is closer to the coordinates for the schwa sound than the coordinates for the other sounds, then both sounds will be transcribed as a schwa, despite being slightly different. If however the sound is nearer to /?/ and /i/, then a phonetician would use those symbols rather than the schwa when transcribing your speech.

There are many instances in phonetics where a symbol represents a range of sounds. For example, to me the /?:/ sound in 'ore' is quite different from that in 'haul' or 'caught'. Also, the /æ/ sound before the voiceless /k/ in /bæk/ is shorter than that before the voiced /g/ in /bæg/. In broad transcription both the clear l and the dark l have the same symbol /l/ despite sounding different.

In my own accent (I'm from south east England), words ending in 'er' always have the stress on the first syllable and the ending is always a schwa. The only word with an 'er' ending that may be stressed that I can think of is 'her' and if it was stressed then I would pronounce and transcribe it /h?:/. Once again, however, it maybe that sometimes your pronunciation is nearer to /?:/ for 'er' endings in which case that is how it would be transcribed. The transcriptions you see in dictionaries, rightly or wrongly, represent what is classed as a standard (if that's the right term) accent for that country. In the UK, that is an accent that is mainly found in the South East of England.

Pronunciationkaren · Answer

Just a quick addition. The one place where I might pronounce an 'er' ending /?:/ is when using a comparative adjective where I particularly wanted to stress the comparison, in which case I would transcribe it as /?:/, but I would only do that when particularly wanting to stress the comparison rather than just stressing the word in general where to me it still sounds nearer to a schwa than a /?:/.

Anonymous · Answer

So what is actually schwa and what standard schwa sounds or coordinates of schwa that are represented by the phonetic alphabet symbol / ? / in the following words?
pens?l
pepp?r
flow?r
pass?ng?r

Anonymous · Answer

pronunciationkarenJust a quick addition. The one place where I might pronounce an 'er' ending /?:/ is when using a comparative adjective where I particularly wanted to stress the comparison, in which case I would transcribe it as /?:/

So how would you pronounce the er endings?

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