The aim of this paper is to examine the phonetic realities of the historical schwa (@ below) in Israeli Hebrew. We asked our informant to read aloud lists of meaningful words with the pattern C@CVCV (C) and meaningless words such as/dadada/and/dedede/. We recorded the phonetic data, analyzed them in terms of their duration and formant frequencies, and have found the following:
(1) @ was realized as [a], [e], [e] and null.
(2) [a], [e] and [e] differ qualitatively in terms of their acoustic properties.
(3) The [a] vowel corresponding to @ has been confirmed to be shorter than the one corresponding to the phonemic /a/.
(4) The vowels corresponding to @ and those corresponding to the phonemic /e/ differ qualitatively. The former can be designated as [e], while the latter is [ε].