We all know that English spelling is rarely a good guide to pronunciation. One big reason for this is the prevalence of schwa in the spoken language. That's why dictionaries and other written guides ...

Ashok Selvam is the former James Beard Award-winning regional editor for Eater’s Midwest region, in charge of coverage in Chicago, Detroit, and the Twin Cities. He’s a native Chicagoan and had been ...

Grammatically speaking, a schwa is the most common vowel sound in the English language. But in the local arts community, it has come to have a different meaning. The Schwa Show, which opens Friday at ...

In 2008, the food writer Alan Richman invited my wife and me to dine at Schwa. He was working on a story about the restaurant’s enigmatic chef, Michael Carlson, and needed more opinions on the ...

Chicago’s restaurant landscape is packed with spots that serve up painstakingly refined food with a particular punk-rock insouciance. The origins of that now familiar mix can be traced, in part, to a ...

Welsh vowel mutation is a purely positional vowel alternation, the effects of which serve to obscure phonemic contrasts between three vowels in the system, namely barred-i [ɨ], schwa [ə] and [u]. The ...