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)