Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 12:52:04 -0700 From: Rudy Troike Subject: A whipping/whupping As Don Lance suggests, the vowel here may be affected in the same way that the initial vowel is in (for some speakers; I use /ow/). At any rate, for the "colloquial" pronunciation of , often represented orthographically as , 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)