as Cantonese "no" and "five". Minnan also has words consisting of a consonant followed by a syllabic nasal, such as pn̄g "cooked rice". So far, all of these syllabic consonants, at least in the lexical words, have been sonorants, such as , , , and , which have a voiced quality similar to vowels. (They can carry tone, for example.) However, there are languages with lexical words that not only contain no vowels, but contain no sonorants at all, like (non-lexical) shh! in English. These include some Berber languages and some languages of the American Pacific Northwest, such as Nuxalk. An example from the latter is "seal fat" (pronounced , as spelled), and a longer one is clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' (pronounced ) "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant". (Follow the Nuxalk link for other examples.) Berber examples include "you took it off" and "you gave it". Some words may contain one or two consonants only: "be", "feed on". (In Mandarin Chinese, words and syllables such as and are sometimes described as being syllabic fricatives and affricates phonemically, and , but these do have a voiced segment that carries the tone.) In the Japonic language Miyako, there are words with no voiced sounds, such as 'dust', 'breast/milk', 'day', 'a comb', 'to make', 'to build', 'month', 'to cut', 'to pull'. Some analyses of Wandala is reported to have no phonemic vowels. Words consisting of only vowels It is not uncommon for short grammatical words to consist of only vowels, such as a and I in English. Lexical words are somewhat rarer in English and are generally restricted to a single syllable: eye, awe, owe, and in non-rhotic accents air, ore, err. Vowel-only words of more than one syllable are generally foreign loans, such as ai (two syllables: ) for the maned sloth, or proper names, such as Iowa (in some accents: ). However, vowel sequences in hiatus are more freely allowed in some other languages, most famously perhaps in Bantu and Polynesian languages, but also in Japanese and Finnic languages. In such languages there tends to be a larger variety of vowel-only words. In Swahili (Bantu), for example, there is aua 'to survey' and eua 'to purify' (both three syllables); in Japanese, aoi 青い 'blue/green' and oioi 追々 'gradually' (three and four morae); and in Finnish, 'intention' and 'open!' (both two syllables), although some dialects pronounce them as and . In