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𐑩
ado

Imagine the sound you would make if someone suddenly ran into you. It would sound like "uh!" Some people call that sound "schwa". That's the sound of the letter 𐑩.

This sound is special, because it can never live in a stressed syllableβ€” only an unstressed syllable.

This sound is one of the commonest, and yet there is no letter in the ordinary alphabet for this sound. Other vowels turn into 𐑩 when they are pronounced in an unstressed syllable. For this reason, any of the vowels in the ordinary alphabet can stand for this sound: it's "a" in "metal", "o" in "bacon", and "e" in "camel".

You already know the letter π‘ͺ. If you think of the vowels pointing at one another in the word "agog", π‘©π‘œπ‘ͺπ‘œ, it might help you to remember the shape of 𐑩.

Now you can write:

metalπ‘₯𐑧𐑑𐑩𐑀"metal"
camel𐑒𐑨π‘₯𐑩𐑀"camel"
canal𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑨𐑀"canal"
ocean𐑴𐑖𐑩𐑯"ocean"
pigeon𐑐𐑦𐑑𐑩𐑯"pigeon"

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Creative Commons photo credits: erix, 66164549@N00, peamasher, dsifry, dragontoller. Lessons by Thomas Thurman, licensed under cc-by-nc-sa..