syllabic consonants. In accents without the merger, use of rather than prevents syllabic consonant formation. Hence in RP, for example, the second syllable of Barton is pronounced as a syllabic , while that of Martin is . Particularly in American linguistic tradition, the unmerged weak -type vowel is often transcribed with the barred i , the IPA symbol for the close central unrounded vowel. Another symbol sometimes used is , the non-IPA symbol for a near-close central unrounded vowel; in the third edition of the OED this symbol is used in the transcription of words (of the types listed above) that have free variation between and in RP. Centralised A phonetic shift of , the vowel , towards schwa, the vowel (and potentially even a phonemic shift: merging with the word-internal variety of schwa in gallop, which is deliberately not called here, since word-final and sometimes also word-initial can be analyzed as – see above), occurs in some Inland Northern American English (those in which the final stage of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift has been completed), New Zealand English, Scottish English, and partially also South African English (see kit–bit split). In non-rhotic varieties with this shift, this also encompasses the unstressed syllable of letters occurs when the stressed variant of is realized with a schwa-like quality . As a result, the vowels in kit , lid , and miss belong to the same phoneme as the unstressed vowel in balance . It typically co-occurs with the weak vowel merger, but in Scotland the weak vowel merger is not complete; see above. There are no homophonous pairs apart from those caused by the weak vowel merger, but a central tends to sound like to speakers of other dialects, which is why Australians accuse New Zealanders of saying "fush and chups" instead of "fish and chips" (which, in an Australian accent, sounds close to "feesh and cheeps"). This is not accurate, as the vowel is always more open than the central ; in other words, there is no strut–comma merger (though a kit–strut merger is possible in some Glaswegian speech in Scotland). This means that varieties of English with this merger effectively contrast two stressable unrounded schwas, which is very similar to the contrast between and in Romanian, as in the minimal pair râu 'river' vs. rău 'bad'. Most dialects with this phenomenon feature happy tensing, which means that pretty is