Lazy vowels!

I didn't find anything in our house search engine, but Google has some stuff on foreign sites that might help:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=91560579520

Thanks for you second link, Avangi. It's much more thorough than what I would have offered. I'd never heard the ubiquitous schwa called a lazy vowel. Always learning!

I'll be happy to take that as a compliment, although it mainly passed from my eye to my finger, only very lightly grazing my brain.

The lazy vowel is also known as a schwa vowel makes a short vowel u sound as in the words: the, of, a, from, done, come, some, mother, brother, about, around, America, etc. When I teach students how to read I teach the schwa sound (an unstressed vowel) as "the lazy vowel" as we can say more emphatically: You are THE man! Usually we say "the" with an unstressed vowel or schwa sound.