PHONO: unvoiced schwa

    I am suddenly curious about unvoiced schwa... as you may see from the
email dialogue betwixt _moi_ and Christophe "Maggelity" Grandsire:

CG >> >Unvoiced schwa then ;))) (a cool sound by the way ;) ).
>
HZ >>     What's the IPA/X-SAMPA???
>
CG >[@_0]. Looks like a smiley ;))) .

HZ >>     Hmm, any languages with it?
>
CG >I think some Native American languages do. They are good at voiceless
>vowels :)) .
HZ  Intriguing. How are they articulated/produced 0_o?

CG >They are often called "murmured vowels", and that's exactly the effect.
>When you murmur, you naturally pronounce unvoiced vowels. Just murmur a schwa
>and you have it (and it indeed sounds very much like [h] :) ).
HZ  I like this _megatem_ - esp'ly as I like the idea of schwa and /h/ being
phonologically linked. I will add this as a schwa option in g0miileg0!!!!

________________________

So! ok... any more info and bright shiny ideas to ferret around;) conlangin'
peeps?


Hanuman Zhang, MangaLanger

     Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...

"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -

title of a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_

= ! gw3rra leg0set kaka! ! riis3rva, saIlva, riikuu, sk0pa-g0mii aen
riizijkl0! =
(Fight Linguistic Waste! Save, Salvage, Recover, Scavenge and Recycle!)

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