Vowels There are five contrastive vowels in Wamesa, as is typical of Austronesian languages. These vowels are shown in the tables below. Five
diphthongs appear in Wamesa: , , , , and . Two-vowel and three-vowel clusters are also common in Wamesa. Almost all VV-clusters contain at least one
high vowel, and no two non-high vowels may be adjacent in larger clusters.
Consonants There are 14 consonants in Wamesa, three of which are marginal (shown in parentheses in the table below). Labial, coronal and velar places of articulation are contrastive in Wamesa. Coronal plosives sound relatively dental and may therefore be referred to as alveolar or alveo-dental until palatography can be executed to corroborate this. Lateral and affricate appear only in loanwords, while all other sounds occur in native Wamesa words. The voiced velar fricative is a marginal phoneme because it only appears following . The coronal tap and trill are in free variation, though the trill tends to occur more in word-initial or word-final position and in careful speech. Place and manner contrasts as described above are supported by the minimal and near-minimal pairs found in the following table. Where possible, Wamesa words have been selected to show native (non-loan) phonemes in the environment /C[labial]a_a/.
Phonotactics Velar plosive only appears following , and can only appear without a following if it is stem-initial.
Glide Phonotactics There are no underlying glides in Wamesa; and are
allophones of the vowel phonemes and . This phonetic alternation is obligatory, permitted, or prohibited, depending upon the environment. High vowels
must become glides word-initially preceding a vowel or intervocalically. They
may optionally become glides when adjacent to a single vowel. Finally, high vowels
never become glides between two consonants, depriving the syllable of a nucleus. Nor do glides appear word-initially preceding a consonant or word-finally following a consonant, in which case the syllable structure would be at odds with the
Sonority Sequencing Principle.
Consonant cluster reduction Complex
onsets and
codas are not permitted in Wamesa, and consonant clusters across syllable boundaries are usually reduced, such that /C1C2/ surfaces as [C2]. However, there are three exceptions to this; clusters of
homorganic nasals and voiced plosives are permitted to surface, as are consonant-
glide clusters that form through the morphophonological processes described above. Additionally, an underlying cluster of a consonant followed by or does not reduce but surfaces as a nasal followed by a homorganic voiced plosive, both of which derive their place features from underlying /C2/. Data from related languages of the
Yapen and
Biakic groups suggests that
historically, and were and in Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian. In this case, these phones would have formed a
natural class of voiced plosives to which
phonological rules could uniformly apply.
Stress Wamesa is a bounded language with a three-syllable, right-aligned stress window, meaning that stress alternates and
primary stress falls on the final, penultimate, or antepenultimate syllable of the
Pword. However, the distribution is not even; in a random sampling test of 105 audio clips, 66 tokens had primary stress on the penultimate syllable. With the addition of
enclitics, primary stress sometimes shifts towards the end of the word to stay within the stress window, but since Wamesa
prefers its metrical feet to be
trochees, stress usually jumps from the head of one foot to the next, rather than jumping single syllables. Note that stress in Wamesa is not predictable, meaning there is no rule for where primary stress will occur. Therefore, stress is specified in the underlying form of words. However, as mentioned earlier, stress shift may occur in certain words in order to create a better phonological structure (i.e. create alternation while avoiding clash and lapse). Secondary stresses are apparent in words of more than two syllables and, in cases of shifting stress, can be added at the beginnings of words to reduce lapses (several adjacent syllables without any stress). In the example below, the addition of the enclitic
determiner = causes primary stress to shift to the right by two syllables (a single foot), and a secondary stress is added to the left in order to fill the lapse. {{interlinear|lang=wad|indent=3 However, secondary stress always precedes primary stress and clitics are never able to carry stress in Wamesa. These two factors mean that the addition of multiple enclitics sometimes causes large lapses at the ends of words. For example, the construction below has a five-syllable lapse at the end. {{interlinear|lang=wad|indent=3 This would appear to be a violation of the three-syllable stress window, but the fact that clitics never carry stress indicates that they may combine with their hosts at the level of the Pphrase rather than at Pword, where the stress window is relevant. Additionally, lapse is evaluated at the level of the Pword, meaning that stress in the following word never shifts to compensate. That is to say, stress in a word following the above construction would never shift leftwards for the purpose of reducing the lapse between words. This is in contrast to clash, (adjacent stressed syllables) which is evaluated at the level of the phonological phrase. Thus, to avoid clash, stress can shift within a word to compensate for the presence of a stressed syllable across a word boundary. For example, the word 'small' typically has a stressed final syllable. However, when followed by 'there' as in the phrase below, stress within shifts to avoid two adjacent stressed syllables. {{interlinear|lang=wad|indent=3 In summary, lapse avoidance can only occur at the level of Pword, while clash avoidance is relevant at the level of Pphrase. == Orthography ==