Quoting Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>:
> On Mon, 04 Apr 2005 10:17:37 -0400, Christopher Wright
> <dhasenan@...> wrote:
>
> > Schwa is a reduced vowel;
>
> Schwa is a mid central vowel. In English, a short schwa is the realisation
> of several reduced vowels.
>
> > in spectrograms,
> > you always tell it because it's extremely short
>
> Not always so. /@:/ exists in the Real World, including in Sinhalese.
There's variants of English that've got it (phonetically) in words like "girl"
[g@:l].
Andreas