Basic inventory 19
/u/ high back rounded vowel
[u] in open and closed syllables
[kunʊɔ] ‘mountain’
[cukɔ] ‘fish’
[purus] ‘dog’
[ʊ] in some closed syllables (subject to inter- and intra-speaker variation)
[bʊnt] ‘tail’
[kʊttɛ] ‘uncle’
/ɔ/ mid back lax rounded vowel
[ɔ] in closed and open syllables
[cɔkɔp] ‘enough’
[cukɔ] ‘fish’
[bɤɔ] ‘time’
[o] in some open syllables (subject to inter- and intra-speaker variation)
[polɛ] ‘again’
[oko] ‘store’
/a/ low central vowel
[aɛ] ‘water’
[kapala] ‘head/chief’
[bɤca] ‘read’
/ə/ mid central vowel
[ənnəm] ‘six’
[ɲəssəl] ‘regret’
As indicated here, there is variation in the realization of some vowels depending
on whether they occur in open or closed syllables. This is taken up in section
4.2.
Although they have a widespread distribution, the high central vowels [ɨ]
and [ɤ] are arguably not phonemic. Rather, they are allophones of [ə] and [a],
respectively. As described in section 2.4, the distinction between [ə] and [ɨ] is
not universally recognized in the literature; however, acoustic analysis does
support the difference (Cohn & Lockwood 1994, Bortscheller 2007). Addition-
ally, the vowel transcribed with the symbol [ɤ] is a mid-close central unrounded
vowel most nearly equivalent to the vowel represented by [ɘ] in standard IPA
transcription.^5 The symbol [ɤ] is used here to ensure consistency with the con-
(^5) My thanks to Jill Beckman for help interpeting the acoustic measurements. Pawitra
(2009) uses [], a low central vowel, for pronunciations in his dictionary.