Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 12:52:04 -0700

From: Rudy Troike RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU

Subject: A whipping/whupping



As Don Lance suggests, the vowel here may be affected in the same way that

the initial vowel is in woman (for some speakers; I use /ow/). At any

rate, for the "colloquial" pronunciation of whipping , often represented

orthographically as whupping , I have a /+/ (= "barred i"), i.e. a high

central vowel, not /I/ nor /U/ nor /[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]/ (schwa). Many people have trouble

recognizing this as a distinct vowel, and may transcribe it as one of the

others, and even when it occurs, for many speakers it is simply an allophone

of one of these phonemes. (I don't push the phonemic status, but simply want

to call attention to the phonetic quality, which I suspect underlies some

of the variable reports on this item in this thread.)



--Rudy Troike (rtroike[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ccit.arizona.edu)