soft palate to the nasopharyngeal wall, creating a velopharyngeal space within the oral cavity; nasal vowels, on the other hand, are typically defined as being created by the lowering of the soft palate, allowing air to escape through the nasal cavity. Two vowel charts appears below. Note that the vowels below represent the phonetic inventory, meaning the set of all (or most) sounds in the language. The phonemic inventory, those sounds which contrastively mark differences in meaning, are highlighted in the list below the vowel charts. The phonemic vowels of Yuchi are ; some levels of phonological or morphological variation must therefore be occurring in order for all of the sounds above to be possible. Phonological variation Phonological variation often occurs in different kinds of morphological environments. For example, the phoneme is often pronounced as in 1st-person singular and impersonal 3rd-person pronouns by Big Pond speakers. Also, the phonemes and can become in unstressed environments. Length Vowel length indicates grammatical function, such as superlative or comparative adjective forms or emphasis. It may also indicate contracted morphemes, and thus is not a phonological process but rather a morphological one. Consonants Yuchi has been analyzed as having from 19 to 40 consonants, chiefly depending on whether the glottalized and labialized consonants are counted, or considered to be sequences with and , respectively. Some of the latter are included in the table in parentheses: Stress and intonation Stress Stress in Yuchi is fairly regular. All major parts of speech have syllable-final stress, and syllable-initial secondary stress; also, particles (one-syllable words) are stressed. There are some minimal pairs to be found due to stress; some representative samples include: – "Creek person, tribe" – "go see someone" – he sees – she sees – "weeds" – "squirrel" As mentioned above, most nouns have syllable-final primary stress; there are, however, some regularized exceptions to this rule, the most common of which are nouns with lexicalized suffixes in the stem, which have stress on the penultimate syllable. Also, contractions within compounded nouns have primary stress on the contraction. There are various other exceptions, but the two mentioned above are the most frequent and the most important in helping us to understand why Yuchi nouns often appear to have irregular stress patterns. Both regular and non-regular stress patterns are exemplified below, all glossed. All data come from Wagner, 1974, unless otherwise noted. – young man – sparks of