Rama phonology

There are three basic vowel sounds: a, i and u. In addition to these, e and o have been introduced as distinct vowels in some foreign loanwords. Each vowel may be either short or long. Here the vowels are shown in standard Rama orthography:

Vowels

	Short			Long
	Front	Central	Back	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u	ii [iː]	ɨɨ [ɨː]	uu [uː]
High-mid	î [ɪ]		û [ʊ]	îî [ɪː]		ûû [ʊː]
Mid	e	ə	o	ee [eː]	əə [əː]	oo [oː]
Low-mid	ê [ɛ]		ô [ɔ]	êê [ɛː]		ôô [ɔː]
Low	æ	a	â [ɑ]	ææ [æː]	aa [aː]	ââ [ɑː]

The following consonants are found (IPA transcriptions are shown where helpful):

Consonants

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labiovelar	Glottal
Voiceless Plosives	p	t	c	k	kw [kʷ]
Voiced Plosives	b	d	j [ɟ]	g
Voiceless Fricatives	f [ɸ]	s	ĉ [ç]	x		h
Voiced Fricatives	v [β]	z	ĵ [ʝ]	ɣ
Nasals	m	n	ɲ	ng [ŋ]	ngw [ŋʷ]
Liquids	ṽ [ʙ]	l, r	ŷ [ʎ]	ł [ʟ]
Semivowels			y [j]	ŵ [ɰ]	w

Rama words have non-predictable stress.

Phonotactics and sandhi

Rama phonotactics includes notable consonant clusters at the beginning of words (e.g. psaarik "toucan", tkua "hot", nkiikna "man", mlingu "killed") and word-internally (e.g. alkwsi "speaks", salpka "fish"). Variations among speakers witness a tendency to simplify such clusters (e.g. nkiikna or kiikna "man", nsu- or su- "we, us, our").

Such clusters often arise due to a tendency to omit unstressed short vowels. For example, when the third person singular subject prefix i- and the past tense suffix -u are added to the verb stem kwis "eat", thus: i- + kwis + -u, the verb stem loses its only vowel, resulting in the form ikwsu "he/she/it ate". Sometimes omitting different vowels may lead to alternative results. Adding the past tense suffix -u to the verb stem maling "kill", i.e. maling + -u, may give either mlingu or malngu "killed".

There are also cases of vowel alternation in morphemes (e.g. the first-person subject prefix may appear as n-, ni- or na-) and lexical stems (thus the stem aakar "stay" may appear in the forms aakir-i "stays" and aaikur-u "stayed", where the short stem vowel copies the vowel of the suffix).

Consonants display a degree of sandhi-type alternation, as seen for example in the final consonant of the same stem aakar "stay, be", cf. the imperative aakit "stay!". This latter variant is found both word-final and before a suffix beginning with a consonant (e.g. aakit-ka "if there is").

External links

• Rama language