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Mono consonants share several traits with other Ubangian languages (Boyd 1989:
199-201). First, the voiced/voiceless contrast is pertinent for both stops and fricatives.
Second, it has prenasalized stops. Third, all consonants occur both word-initially and
word-medially, with the exception of , which is not attested word-initially in my corpus.
This may be due to the fact that it is rare.
The consonant system presented here differs from the one presented in Kamanda
(1998) in four respects. First, Kamanda considers prenasalized stops to be sequences of a
nasal phoneme followed by a stop phoneme. His main reason for doing so is for the sake
of economy (p. 148). By employing this analysis, he reduces the phoneme inventory by
five phonemes. However, I have not followed that analysis mainly for distributional
reasons. There are no unambiguous consonant clusters in Mono, and thus treating the
prenasalized stops as N+C sequences would require introducing a CCV syllable pattern
which is otherwise unwarranted in Mono. In many Bantu languages, such as Runyambo
and Luganda (Hubbard 1995), prenasalized stops are analyzed as nasal + consonant
sequences because of compensatory lengthening effects. It is important to highlight that
such effects do not occur in Mono. I revisit this point in Section 8.1.4.
A second way in which the consonant system presented here differs from that of
Kamanda (1998) is that Kamanda classifies the labial-velar stops F F F F and C> C> as
implosives. There are several reasons why I have not opted to do this. First, there are no
corresponding labial-velar plosives in his system. Typologically, phonetically complex
consonants, such as implosives, tend to imply the existence of their simpler consonantal
counterparts (Burquest 1998: 49). Second, implosive labial-velars are very rare. In fact,
they do not occur in Maddieson’s (1984) typological survey of phonetic sounds. Third,
voiceless implosives are also very rare in the world’s languages, which would discourage
us from considering F F F F to be an implosive. On the other hand, labial-velar plosives are
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