Consonants Gemination can occur due to morphological processes, for example
del 'skin' +
-ná →
dellá 'my skin'.
Vowels Kumam has ten vowels, with a vowel harmony system based on presence or absence of
advanced tongue root (ATR). Vowels have no distinction in length, except due to some morphological processes, for instance
compensatory lengthening that occurs when applying the
transitive infinitive suffix
-nɔ:
ted- 'cook' +
-ne → *ted-do →
teedo 'to cook'.
Tone There exist six tones: low, high, falling, rising, downstep high and double downstep high.
Tone sandhi Kumam exhibits
tone sandhi in two ways. The first is the spreading of high tonemes rightwards to the following words beginning with a low tonemes, as in
ɑbúké 'eyelash' +
waŋ 'eye' →
abúké wâŋ 'eyelash'. The second is when a
floating high toneme is followed by a word beginning in a low toneme, where the floating tone is assigned to the following word and not the word bearing the floating tone:
cogó 'bone' +
rac 'bad' →
cogo râc 'The bone is bad.' ==Grammar==