This Bank Holiday afternoon I’ve been pottering about at home and listening to The Full Score on RTÉ Lyric FM, which is presented by Liz Nolan. I like this programme because it consists of performances of full works rather than bits and pieces extracted from longer compositions (“bleeding chunks” as my music teacher at school used to call them). Unfortunately this programme is broadcast on weekday afternoons so I can’t listen to it often except when I’m off work.
The presenter’s surname Nolan made me reflect on how many Irish surnames end with –an. Other examples aside from Nolan include Regan, Keegan, Dolan, Coogan, Behan, Whelan and Moran. In Ireland these are all pronounced with a stress on the first syllable, as they are in English pronunciation, but curiously English people usually pronounce the last with a stress on the second syllable, i.e. Mor-AN. I’ve been pulled up for doing this on more than one occasion. Here in Ireland it’s not Mor-AN but MOR-an. A little googling suggests that the English version is influenced by the French name Morant rather than the original Gaelic Ó Móráin.
Anyway this line of thought took me to the realization that the vowel in an unstressed final syllable such as in Nolan is a very indistinct sound. You could almost put any vowel in there and get the same sound: “Nolan” could easily be transcribed as “Nolon” or “Nolun” etc if the second syllable is not stressed.
Then I realized that linguists, specifically those who study phonetics and phonology, have been there long before me. There is a name for the indistinct vowel sound in such cases: it is called schwa and is denoted by the character ə. Schwa sits right in the middle of the vowel chart. Produced when the lips and tongue are completely relaxed, it’s neither an open nor a closed vowel but something in between. It’s actually quite a common sound in English, though it’s taken me almost 60 years to discover its name! – and exists in many other languages too.
In the Dark 