The UVic Writer's Guide
Unstressed Vowels
In speech, vowels in unstressed positions are often levelled to
the sound uh, represented Iy the schwa symbol in phonetic spelling. (It looks like a lower-case letter
efacing backwards.) In regular spelling, however, the vowel sounds
these words used to have are still represented, which leads to
confusion. The endings -ance and -ence, -ant and -ent are commonly confused for this reason.
The only real solution is to carefully memorize the spelling of
each word that takes one of these endings.
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Copyright, The Department of English, University of Victoria,
1995
This page updated Sept 23, 1995