The word that knocked runner-up Naysa Modi out of last year's Scripps National Spelling Bee was 'Bewusstseinslage' — one of those flashy, impossible-sounding German-derived words that make the audience gasp when they are announced. Naysa believes the seemingly mundane word that knocked
1 / 2 FILE - In this May 31, 2018 file photo, Lauren Guo, 12, from Arvada, Colo., competes in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Oxon Hill, Md. An unremarkable sound can be the toughest thing for spellers to master at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It's known as the schwa. It sounds like"Uh," and any vowel can make the sound.
For the spellers who will gather starting Monday at a convention center outside Washington for this year's bee, an unremarkable sound is the cause of their angst, their sleepless nights, their lifelong memories of failure. It's the most common sound in the English language, represented in the dictionary by an upside-down"e," a gray chunk of linguistic mortar."It's the bane of every speller's existence," Naysa said."It's what we hate.
And because English absorbs words from every language, words with obvious spellings in their native tongues can become mysterious. Naysa, a 13-year-old from Frisco, Texas, who will be back for one last crack at the bee this year, got dinged out in seventh place two years ago by the word"marasmus," which means a condition of chronic undernourishment. She went with an"e'' for the first vowel. If the word were spelled that way, the pronunciation would be exactly the same.
Anisha Rao of Corona, California, who tied for 10th in last year's bee, said she deals with tricky schwas the old-fashioned way: rote memorization. "As a general rule, often trademarks and words from unknown languages that might look shorter, might look easier, are actually way hard," Sylvie said."You're sort of in the dark. You have to do what you can to put it together with very limited information."
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