Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

[?w?]?

I think having a schwa in it would make it sound like "schwuh." 🙂

FWIW, “schwa” does have a schwa in it in Hebrew (??????, from which the word comes) where it is pronounced approx. /??.?v?/. In French orthography this could be written “cheva”; in English, something like shuh-VAH. But now the name in English is pronounced /?wa/ (or /?w??/) (in French this would then be written something like “choi”). The phoneme itself is, of course, pronounced /?/.