Re: How to write Schwa?

From: Ben Zimmer (bgzimmer_at_midway.uchicago.edu)
Date: 08/16/04 

Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 15:50:40 -0400

"Peter T. Daniels" wrote:
>
> Andreas Prilop wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> >
> > >> Why schould one write the Hebrew word "schwa" in the Englisch
> > >> language with German schpelling?
> > >
> > > Because it arrived there via Yiddish, maybe? Which is historically a
> > > German dialect, with Hebrew and Slavic words added to it.
> >
> > But Yiddish is also written with Hebrew letters. So this cannot be
> > an explanation for the "sch" spelling. And the usual transliteration
> > of Yiddish uses "sh", too.
>
> The standard excuse is that the Hebrew word "shwa" was introduced into
> linguistics by a German linguist, who naturally spelled it as in German,
> and when it was borrowed into English, the borrowed spelling was
> retained.

So who was the German linguist? The first citation given in OED2 is:

        1895 P. GILES Compar. Philol. 134
        Indo-G. 'schwa' or the neutral vowel.

That's _A short manual of comparative philology for classical students_
by Peter Giles (the same fellow who contribued many entries to the 11th
Britannica: "Aryan", "Indo-European languages", "philology", etc.).

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