| π© |
|---|
| 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 π©.
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 π© 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 πͺ. If you think of the vowels pointing at one another in the word "agog", π©ππͺπ, it might help you to remember the shape of π©.
Now you can write:
| π₯π§ππ©π€ | "metal" | |
| ππ¨π₯π©π€ | "camel" | |
| ππ©π―π¨π€ | "canal" | |
| π΄ππ©π― | "ocean" | |
| ππ¦π‘π©π― | "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..