Choosing the right schwa
There are two lowercase schwa characters and you might think either one will work for you. They are ə and ǝ.
This one will rise up and bite you if you are not careful! This is where looking at the Unicode documentation is important. If you look at the chart
for you will see:
There are a number of useful bits of information here. The second bullet tells you “uppercase is Ə”. This tells us that is the uppercase match to this character. Another bit of useful information is right below that: “variant uppercase form Ǝ is associated with ǝ.”
Another interesting test is to type both of the schwas into a word processor (like Word). Select them both and click on . You should see two different forms of the uppercase schwa. This shows you how important it is to match the lowercase character (which looks exactly the same) with the correct uppercase character (which looks significantly different).
In this example you want to make sure that if you are using Ə in your orthography, you should use ə for the lowercase.
This article formerly appeared on ScriptSource.