Spoken Mumuder has five vowel sounds and fifteen consonant sounds. The descriptions below are approximate. Audio files for pronunciation study will be provided here in due course, so that the learner can imitate the sounds of a Mumuder speaker.

Vowels

i

the vowel sound in clean

e

the vowel sound in bed

a

the first vowel sound in father

o

the first vowel sound in Spanish Jose

u

the vowel sound in Spanish Lupe

Vowels in Mumuder are voiceless when they occur in monosyllabic words between two voiceless consonants.

Consonants

The voiceless stops p, t and k are unaspirated in prevocalic positions as in Dutch, Spanish, French and Italian, not aspirated as in English and German.

Although r is classed here as a liquid, it is phonetically a voiceless aspirated dental trill in word-initial position and a voiceless aspirated dental flap elsewhere.

Although classed with the dentals, the fricative pair s and z are in fact retroflex in word-initial position.

The voiceless velar fricative h is the final sound in German Bach or Scots loch.

Note that the fricative pair f and v are bilabial as in the first consonants in Japanese Fuji and Spanish evidencia, respectively, not labiodental as in English fool and vice.

Syllables

Every syllable in Mumuder consists of a vowel which is optionally preceded and followed by a single consonant: the onset and coda, respectively. Although each of the fifteen consonants can occur as an onset or coda, only seven of them can occur as the coda of a monosyllabic root: p, t, k, v, z, l and r.

Word Stress

Because affixes cannot carry stress in Mumuder, primary word stress is on the first stem syllable of the word -- the stem being that part of the word to which affixes (prefixes and suffixes) have been added.

Examples: Mumuder (the Mumuder language), mumuar (a person who is INTJ), mumuarte (persons who are INTJ)

Spelling and Punctuation

Mumuder can be written in a number of different scripts, but only the Latin script will be considered in this reference grammar. With two exceptions, one sound as described above corresponds to one letter of the Latin script, and vice versa. The exceptions are the use of an apostrophe to represent the epenthetic schwa which occurs between certain pairs of consonants and the epenthetic glottal stop which occurs between certain pairs of vowels. Both the schwa and the glottal stop are completely predictable and therefore not phonemic, and it is not incorrect to omit the apostrophe in writing.

Punctuation marks in Latin-script writing are the same as in most European languages, but their usage is somewhat idiosyncratic. The period (full stop) indicates an assertion or rhetorical question; the question mark indicates an erotetic question; and the exclamation mark indicates an exclamation or command.