Many words have a Clayton's vowel (a vowel that you have when you're not really having a vowel). Such vowels can't be heard as a, e, i, o or u, but they just makes a bit of a noise - for example, the sound represented by 'i' in 'valid', or by 'o' in 'carrot'.
Clayton's vowels present a real problem for people learning to spell, because you can't tell which vowel to use to represent them. e-speec follows a convention of using an 'a' for a Clayton's (unstressed) vowel that has the sound 'u', and an 'e' in all other places, unless the Clayton's vowel has a clear sound of a particular vowel. A Clayton's vowel with the short sound 'u' occurs at the beginning and end of the word banarna (banana), and also in jernalist (journalist), marjareen (margarine), cwota (quota) and tantalize (tantalise). (Note also that the endings -able and -ible are consistently represented by -abl in e-speec).
So we get: hammer, acter (actor) (we use 'e' because the sound is not clearly 'u'), voluntery (voluntary), potent, ireny (irony), jargen (jargon), lavatery (lavatory), ultimet (ultimate), lessen (lesson, lessen), litteret (literate), miner (minor, miner), minnet (minute (n)), mounten (mountain), perrel (peril), persen (person), capabl (capable), nollij (knowledge - the sound of the vowel in the second syllable is clearly 'i').
The ending '-er' often sounds like an unstressed '-a' - for example, the sound at the end of
'butter' is like the sound at the end of 'cwota' (quota), or 'trorma' (trauma). But it seems worthwhile
nevertheless to retain the two distinct endings rather than spell them in the same way. (Note that
the difference is greater in North America, where r's are more clearly pronounced.)
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