876. You'll never view spellers in the bee asking questions the same way again after you learn about the schwa from Brian Sietsema, an associate pronouncer for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
876. You'll never view spellers in the bee asking questions the same way again after you learn about the schwa from Brian Sietsema, an associate pronouncer for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes
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Mignon:
Hey, everyone. It's Mignon, Grammar Girl here, and we have a special show about the spelling bee and the "dreaded schwa" this week. I usually try to space out the special episodes more, but we had an opportunity to interview someone from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which is coming up, and I just couldn't resist because I think you'll find it really interesting. I know I'll watch the kids in the bee asking all their questions and understand it all much better now. And then next week, I'm also going to have a special episode about one of my absolutely favorite topics — why we don't say "thou" anymore — and I think you'll love that too. And then after that, we'll be back to the more normal shows for at least a few weeks.
Mignon:
With me today, I have Brian Sietsema, one of the associate pronouncers for the Scripps National Spelling bee. Brian, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Brian:
Glad to be here, Grammar Girl.
Mignon:
. Yes, I am a big fan of the spelling bee. The kids are just impressive and adorable at the same time. How many years have you been working with them?
Brian:
This bee coming up at the end of May, will be my 20th National Bee, so it's been two decades now.
Mignon:
Wow. So we're going to talk about the dreaded schwa in just a minute, but before we start, I'd love to get a little bit of the history of the Bee. So I read that the first winner was an 11-year-old in 1925, and that the winning word was gladiolus. So about how many kids compete in this spelling bee at these, this big, final round that's gonna be televised.
Brian:
So this coming bee at the end of May, we're going to have 234 spellers from around the country.
Mignon:
That's amazing.
Brian:
Yeah.
Mignon:
Do you know how many about how many of those are whittled down from ... I mean, what's the pool at the beginning that comes down to these few hundred students?
Brian:
Oh, quite literally thousands and thousands of spellers from every local school around the country that is part of the spelling bee system. They have their ... they have to win at their own school, and then they have district bees and then state bees. So it's the winners who come ahead of all those regional bees that make it to the nationals in Washington, DC.
Mignon:
Yeah. And it seems a little bit like it might run in families. Like I know family support would be very important for kids who are studying for something as significant as the bee, and I saw that there are siblings, and twins, and legacies ... kids whose older siblings came before. How common is that?
Brian:
It's very common. Every year we have spellers who either had a sibling ahead of them in the bee, or even a parent, in some cases who were ... who was a part of the bee a generation ago. Bee interest tends to run in families. And we enjoy seeing some of those families again and again, year after year, as each of the kids in the family moves into eligibility for the bee.
Mignon:
And it's good training for life, isn't it? I mean, these kids I've heard go on to do interesting things as they age out of the bee too.
Brian:
Absolutely. You know, studying for the spelling bee ... first of all, it is an exercise in self-discipline. It takes inner motivation to want to sit down with a list of words and learn their meaning, their pronunciation, and their spellings. Beyond that, learning about the spelling of the English language is really a great introduction to the history of the English speaking peoples. And you get knowledge of words from science, math, music, all kinds of different disciplines. English is notorious for borrowing words from languages around the world. And so you learn a little something about cultures from every continent. It's a great way to build your intellectual knowledge base.
Mignon:
And one thing I was wondering is, is a spelling bee something that happens in countries that use all languages, or is the spelling bee more of an English-specific thing?
Brian:
Yeah, it's very much an English-specific thing. I think I I've heard of spelling bees for the Greek language, but really English is the best one because many languages have reformed their spelling systems so that the spelling and pronunciation match quite exactly. And if you have that, if you know how to pronounce a word, then you know how to spell a word. And English is the one that preserves the history of so many of the words, spellings, and as a result, as pronunciations change, there's kind of a divergence between sound and sight. And in that case, it gives you the opportunity to have a spelling bee because there's all kinds of things going on.
Mignon:
So the trickiness of our language and the fact that it encapsulates this history makes it particularly suitable for spelling bees.
Brian:
Exactly so.
Mignon:
Great. So I know you wanted to talk about something the spellers call the "dreaded schwa." So why don't you tell our listeners first. What is the schwa?
Brian:
So the schwa is a very basic vowel sound. In fact, it's the most basic vowel sound. It's the sound that your voice makes when all of the musculature in your vocal tract is completely relaxed. If you just breathe in and let the air go out over your vocal chords, as they vibrate, uh, what that sound that will come out is a schwa. Uh, now we start with the schwa, and we start pinching off different parts of the vocal tract, and we get all the other vowels. So if you raise your tongue near the front of the mouth, you get an E I, if you raise your tongue, you're the back of the mouth. You get an Ooh, if you round your lips as well. Uh, uh, but that basic "uh" is kind of the stuff that all vowels are made of.
Mignon:
So it's particularly troublesome for spellers because it can be represented by a whole bunch of different letters, right?
Brian:
Just about any vowel letter or combination of vowel letters can be manifested in speech as the schwa sounds. So the A in "comma," the E in "profit," the I in "profit" as well, the O in "carrot," the Y in "vinyl." And schwa sometimes appears where there's no vowel letter at all in a word like "rhythm" or "algorithm." Suddenly there's a vowel popping up between consonant letters. Likewise, vowel diagraphs. So two vowels next to each other can be a schwa sound. Like in "mountain," the AI, or in "ocean," the EA, or in "Belgium," the IU, many other examples. So, you hear a schwa and there's no immediate way to know which letter is being used in the spelling.
Mignon:
So aside from just pure memorization, are there any tricks that the spellers use when they get a word that they hear the schwa and then think, "Oh, no!" You know, what can they do if they don't know? If they haven't memorized that word?
Brian:
So they're allowed to ask certain questions. One trick that they try to play is to over pronounce the sound of the vowel that is a schwa and hope to elicit from us a "yes," that that's the way the word is. So the word is "telescope." That second vowel is a schwa, and they might repeat back to us "tel-ee-scope," fishing for the E. And we say, "telescope." We just stick with the schwa sound. It's frustrating for them, but things they can ask: They can ask for the part of speech. And that might not seem immediately like a good clue, but it can be. So for example there are words that end in "-us." So something like stupendous. And if you know that that's an adjective, you'll be familiar with the very common "-ous" ending. So in that case, if you hear an adjective ending in "-us," you can have a good guess that it's "-ous" there.
Brian:
I can't think of any adjectives that end in just "-us." Whereas if it's a noun, like the word for stomach rumbling, "borborygmus," if you know, it's a noun, then your guess will be that it doesn't end in "-s" but simply "-us" like many nouns that come through Latin, in this case out of Greek through Latin.
Brian:
There are two words that sound the same: "calculus." One's a noun, one's an adjective. Calculus, the math, is a noun ands in "-us." Calculous having to do with calculi or stones, like say kidney stones, is an adjective, and that ends in "-ous." So if they know the part of speech, that can be a clue.
Brian:
In other examples, they can ask for the language of origin, and knowing whether a word is from Greek or from Latin can be helpful, especially in some of those connecting vowels between two roots.
Brian:
So let's take the word from Greek roots, "metropolitan" — mother, city, "meter" and "polis." If you hear that second vowel, which is a schwa, you can have a pretty good guess that that's gonna be an O, because Greek words tend to use O as that vowel to connect two roots. So "metropolitan" ... O. Let's use the same root for "mother" in Latin, "matria," like the word "matrimonial." There again, that second vow is a schwa, but when Latin wants to connect two roots, in this case "matra" and "mon," it ... we often use an I. And so if you know that the word is from Latin, then you can guess M A T R I, and you'd be on the right track.
Mignon:
Another way they can get at schwa is asking for alternate pronunciation. So many words have more than one pronunciation. The word for the, garden herb arugula also has the pronunciation "arug-you-la" with that Y-sound just before the schwa.
Brian:
Well, that's a good indication that that vowel is a U because U is the only vowel that regularly has alternate pronunciations with or without that Y sound. Sometimes when the stress moves (of course, schwa appears in unstressed syllables, largely) when the stress moves in an alternate pronunciation, then sometimes the value of that underlying vowel pops up. So a word like "doctrinal" also has a pronunciation "doctrinal." And so then that second vowel, doctrinal, which is a schwa in the first pronunciation, you see the full long I vowel, "doctr-eye-nal," in the alternate pronunciation. And there are lots of examples of that. So if they can ask part of speech, language of origin, alternate pronunciations, and then of course the meaning of the word can help too. The difference between complement, meaning something that completes with an E and compliment, meaning something nice that you say to someone with an I, knowing that difference will be the clue to what that schwa is gonna be in the spelling.
Mignon:
Mm-hmm Where do the example sentences come from? Who writes those?
Brian:
The bee team ... we have a word panel, and they write those example sentences to help the spellers. Sometimes the definition by itself doesn't really help understand what the thing is. But if you hear the use in a sentence, it gives you an idea of, oh, this is how it's used, or this is the kind of animal that it is. And we try to write the sentences so that it's more illustrative of what the word would mean. And then there's ... we've got other people who write funny sentences to keep the spellers amused as well.
Mignon:
I know everyone loves those.
Brian:
Yes.
Mignon:
So thinking about word origins, actually, what is the origin of the word "schwa" itself? It's kind of an odd word when you think about it.
Brian:
It is an odd word. That word comes from Hebrew, and it means "emptiness." And it's kind of a zen-like concept for a vowel. But it is ... there is a vowel in Hebrew, a little short, transitional vowel, that is called in Hebrew "schwa" though. It's not quite the same as what we call schwa in English. But that's where the name comes from. Now. The symbol for schwa though, is an upside down E, and that symbol was devised by a linguist back in the 19th century. He was describing a dialect of Bavarian German. And so he turned an E upside down to indicate that that sound, that we know is schwa, uh.
Mignon:
Hmm. I presume because languages are so diverse, there be languages that don't have the schwa sound at all. Is that true?
Brian:
Indeed. There are, you know, many languages do not have any kind of schwa. Their vowels are all close to the cardinal vowels as we call them, the full vowel sound. So a language like Greek does not have a schwa or Hawaiian or Spanish. But other languages do have the schwa. So French has a schwa. Dutch and Welsh and Russian and Ukrainian all have schwas just like English.
Mignon:
So I would imagine too ... the language of origin ... if a speller hears that a word comes from Hawaiian, for example, let's say a language that doesn't have the schwa, then they would be more likely to know that it doesn't have a schwa in the English spelling, right? That's another clue, right?
Brian:
That would be a clue in this sense, because although a Hawaiian word in its native pronunciation won't have a schwa in it, when it comes into common English, English speakers will often relax the unstressed vowels and not give them their full value. But it's most likely when you hear a word from Hawaiian that has a schwa, that, that schwa goes back to an "ah" sound or the letter A. So that would be a help to them knowing that language of origin.
Mignon:
That makes sense. So we change, of course ,we change the pronunciation of words when they come into English all the time.
Brian:
Oh, we do. Yes, we do.
Mignon:
Are there any other words that, say, share the same etymology as schwa? Like, are there other related words in English that go back to the same origin as schwa in Hebrew? Or is it kind of out there on its own?
Brian:
So far as I know, it's kind of out there on its own. I mean, we've got plenty of words in English from Hebrew, but in, in terms of grammatical terms like that or linguistic terms, I can't think of too many others. No.
Mignon:
OK.
Brian:
One of the reasons schwa is such a difficulty for the spellers is because about a third of all the vowels in English end up being schwa.
Mignon:
Wow.
Brian:
English is a language that likes to stress every other syllable. So "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" shows that tendency, but all those unstressed syllables often end up being schwa. And so if you've got a word of three syllables long, two generally will be stressed, but it leaves one in the middle to be unstressed. And as a result, it's true about a third of all the vowels in English are schwa. So it's, it's a very prevalent vowel. And there are very few words that a speller is going to encounter in the bee that won't have a schwa in there somewhere.
Mignon:
Mm-hmm, like, gladioli the last syllable on that is a schwa, right?
Brian:
"Gladiolus," indeed, is a schwa at the end. Yep.
Mignon:
In the very first year.
Brian:
That's right. That good point.
Mignon:
Yeah. Wonderful. Well, why don't you tell us how and where people can watch the bee this year? This will air on Friday, May 20th, 2022. And so this year, where can people watch this wonderful event?
Brian:
It's on Ion TV this year. It's moved from ESPN to Ion TV, and we're hoping that being on that platform will allow many more people to be able to view the bee.
Mignon:
Right. Because it's not on cable, right.?
Brian:
It's not on cable. You don't need a cable subscription in order to watch the bee this year.
Mignon:
That's great. And what are the dates?
Brian:
Yes, the competition begins itself on Tuesday, May 31st, with the preliminary rounds, and then it continues on June 1st, and then the finals take place on the evening of Thursday, June 2nd.
Mignon:
Wonderful. Well, I will be watching, and I'm so excited for the kids to compete and have this great experience and win some wonderful prizes too. Thank you, Brian Sietsema for joining me today and telling us all about the schwa.
Brian:
Thank you, Mignon.
Mignon:
Thanks, everyone, for listening, and you can find a link to the transcript for this podcast in the show description.