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very common in African languages. Seeing no benefit typologically or analytically to
classifying labial-velars as implosives, I have opted to classify them as plosives instead.
Having said this, Ladefoged (1968) points out that labial-velars may have an
ingressive aspect which may lead to an implosive-like percept. I discuss this in more
detail in Section 8.1.3.
A third way in which the consonant system presented here differs from that of
Kamanda (1998) is that Kamanda groups palatal and velar consonants in a “dorsal”
category. He is thus able to reduce the number of place of articulation columns by one,
but he is then obliged to add an “affricate” manner of articulation row to his chart.
Fourth, Kamanda does not include a palatal nasal consonant in his inventory.
Indeed, the phoneme is marginal in my own analysis. As we will see in Chapter 4, it is
possible to re-analyze the sound as a sequence of + in Mono.
2.1.1 Labial consonants
I group the bilabial and labiodental consonants into a labial category. Eight labial
consonants are attested in Mono: , F, >, > >, > > B, L, , and M. The fricatives B and L have a
labiodental articulation, whereas the rest of the consonants in the category are bilabial.
The labial flap is usually bilabial M, but it may alternatively be produced as a labiodental
flap L. The choice of these symbols for transcribing the sound are based on the IPA’s
(1989: 70) recommendation of indicating taps and flaps by use of the breve diacritic.
The implosive occurs in over 20 lexical items in my corpus. In terms of its
occurrence in lexical items, it is not one of the more common phonemes in Mono.
However, it does occur in certain morphemes which are common in discourse:
29
‘2SG’
and =( =( =( =( ‘at’. In many lexical items in my corpus, can be replaced by >, e.g. C>= C>= C>= C>=
~
C>=> C>=> C>=> C>=>
‘bone’. More research is necessary to determine if this variation is limited to
certain lexical items or if it can occur with any word containing the sound. This type of
variation is also attested between and @, as discussed below.