Re: Schwa vowel, which letter?

Tom Wier wrote:

>Herman Miller wrote:
>
>> I can't think of a language that uses "x" as a
>> vowel (although Cherokee uses a "v")
>
>But when Sequoya (sp?) created the Cherokee alphabet, he didn't
>make any letters cross over whatsoever, because he couldn't read
>(or maybe even speak) English.  The story goes that one day he just
>realized that the White Man's strenght lay in his ability to record
>information, so he bought a local newspaper and took letters off
>the newspaper, and created his own phonetic alphabet for Cherokee
>(or maybe it was a syllabary, can't remember which) with 85
>characters (come to think of it, it was probably a syllabary).
>
>So, naturally, he had lots of characters that looked like English
>orthographic vowels.  The Cherokee still use his system, BTW.
Yes, but I don't think Herman was talking about the Sequoyah
syllabary.  It's actually the standard Latin transcription of
Cherokee which uses "v" to represent a vowel - viz. a back-central
nasalised vowel, represented in IPA by an upside-down "v" with a
tilde over it.

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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