April 20, 2023: Phonological Rip-Tide Finds -

DRINKAMUGAMILKAMEAL!

That’s what the banner by the winking cow on the Milky Way milk trucks says: Drink a mug a milk a meal! There are many Milky Way trucks on I-5. I was behind one for hours recently, silently chanting DRINK a MUG a MILK a MEAL, missing the OF before MILK, wondering if I would have preferred PER meal. 

It hailed. It was a crummy drive.  

I’m in Phonology this term. I thought it would be an introductory Linguistics class, but Noooooo, that would have been Phonetics. My mistake. I was struggling to keep up, but I stopped. Now the waves wash over me. Sometimes I grasp a concept, and sometimes I just admire one as it flashes past.

In DRINKAMUGAMILKAMEAL, those first three A’s are pronounced “UH.” That’s the vowel sound called schwa, the one that looks like an upside down lower-case E. 

In your mouth, the schwa vowel is notable for being right in the middle – not high, not low, not front, not back. Easy to reach. The schwa is by definition “unstressed,” and also “reduced.” You, as an English speaker, hear the unstressed part in the DUM-de-DUM-de-DUM rhythm with which you might (in tragic circumstances) find yourself chanting: DRINK a MUG a MILK a MEAL.

You also perform the “reduced” bit, perhaps without knowing it. Suppose someone you loved was hypnotized by a Milky Way truck, and now drank four mugs of milk with every meal. You might point out that the injunction was to drink *A* mug of milk, not *FOUR* mugs of milk.

And when you were stressing your point, you would likely pronounce A like the name of the letter A, rather than like UH.

Or not! Maybe you’d say, “Drink UH mug of milk!” (We are ignoring the OF to UH change. Related, different, long story. You’re welcome.) 

If you DID stress UH, instead of saying A-like-the-letter, you still wouldn’t be using a schwa.

That’s what “by definition” means.

The sound UH in MUG or CUT or DUCK or the first syllable of FLUCTUATE is not reduced. It’s stressed, kindof, though in single-syllable words, that’s debatable. But the symbol for those UHs, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, is different. It is called caret or carrot or wedge. It looks like an upside down V.

If you are pre-edified about all this, cool. I’ll just leave you with one thought: Did you ever know someone who thought it was a real knee slapper to tell you that you had put the em-FA-sis on the wrong syl-LOB-le? If you say it right – EMphasis on the right SYLlable, as it were – the unaccented syllables in the middle of both words have the vowel sound schwa. That’s kinda nice.