schwa

I can’t remember if the scene from The Simpsons overwrote the time in elementary school when I actually learned what a schwa was, but this is nonetheless how I remember it today: “No, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you.” 

But looking today for a way to use the schwa character in some text, I had to google it, which meant I had to remember how to spell schwa, which allowed me to realize I had no idea where this word comes from. From Etymonline: from the German word Schwa, where much like in English it represented a “mid-central vowel sound.” And that word comes from the Hebrew shewa, “a neutral vowel quality” but also “emptiness.” Wiktionary mostly agrees, but transliterates the Hebrew word שווא / שְׁוָא as sh'va and šəwā and also translates it as “nought.” It also says the Hebrew word comes from the Classic Syriac ܫ̈ܘܰܝܳܐ (š'wayyā, literally “even, equal”), meaning “a term for a sign consisting of two vertical dots used to separate parts of a sentence.”