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>I am reading here that a language has a 'mid-central glide' consonant >phoneme. (So presumably schwa behaving as a consonant.) >I'd be grateful for pointers to any discussion about such entities. In the analysis of (American) English popular in the 1950s and 1960s, the schwa glide was assigned to the phoneme /h/. As well as the obvious voiceless prevocalic realization(s), it was posited that postvocalically /h/ is realized as a schwa off-glide (or as a lengthening of open vowels). Thus the in-gliding diphthong of American southern "big" was analysed as /bihg/, and RP etc "here" would have been taken as /hih/. This analysis is found in the then highly influential Trager GL & Smith HL 1951 An outline of English structure. In Gleason HA 1955 Intro to descriptive linguistics, the step of identifying the schwa glide with preconsonantal /h/ is seen as a step too far, and the schwa glide is analysed instead as a phoneme /H/. I adopted the /H/ analysis in describing my own speech in my first published article, in m.f. 117 2-5 (1962). This idea never caught on in Britain. But in the States you can still see traces of it, for example in Labov's latest magnum opus, where the vowel of "caught" is written /oh/, and "four" as /fohr/. John Wells