Recently in Phonetics Category

These are the fonts my inner linguist can't live without. Many of these are from academic consortiums (consortia) who offer them for free. This avoids the trouble of waiting for the corporate vendors to get around to us linguists (we really aren't that big a customer base darn it!)

TITUS Cyberbit - Freeware from the University of Frankfurt. This includes characters from many scripts such as Armenian, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic and more. I find that the characters for each script have been designed for god readability based on traditional forms.

SIL Fonts - Your choices are Charis SIL (a new font designed partially for print), Doulos SIL and Gentium. These include all phonetic symbols and Latin alphabet symbols as wellas Greek and Cyrillic. Additional phonetic symbols are included in the Private Use Area.

Cardo - This one is tied to the Thesaurus Linga Graecae and includes Coptic and unusual variants and rare ancient Greek letters/symbols in the Private Use Area as well as Latin and phonetic letters. I rarely need a digamma, but I'm very happy to have it available.

Aboriginal Sabs Serif - This one includes phonetic stuff and Cherokee and Canadian Aborigonal Syllabics (another script used by several Native American Languages). Oh, and it gets you a sans-serif phonetics font.

Chrysanthi (Chrʃsanþi) - Don't let the New Age symbols fool you. The Chrysanthi font is actually a nice little addition for your font library containing symbol Unicode blocks which are otherwise hard to find. (FYI - þ = "th" and ſ = "s").

Junicode - Includes characters for medieval languages, Runes and more unusual combined characters and medieval symbols in the Private Use Area.

If there's one phonetic symbol Americans are mostly likely to know it's the "schwa" /ə/ or "upside down e" for the "uh" sound. I personally remember from elementary school. Here it is in multiple fonts

Sound

In phonetics this is the sound similar to "uh" in American English. In many dialects of English, vowels of unstressed syllables are commonly pronounced as schwa and is one reason for spelling difficulties (e.g. is it -ible or -able both of which are really [əbəl]) It's a common "neutral" or "resting" vowel found in many languages including French, Welsh, Irish and others.

Origin of Glyph

Schwa is close to Spanish "e" (and closer to French "e" of le), so that's why the Letter E got flipped in this case.

Origin of Name

The word "schwa" is from the Hebrew word שְׁוָא (šěwā’, /ʃəˈwa/), meaning "nought"—it originally referred to one of the niqqud vowel points used with the Hebrew alphabet, which looks like a vertical pair of dots under a letter. This sign has two uses: one to indicate the schwa vowel-sound

–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa#The_term (19 Feb 2007)