Eastern Pomo. Consonants Eastern Pomo has thirty-eight consonants. The voiceless plosives have a three-way distinction for each point of articulation: unaspirated (plain), aspirated, and ejective. The plosives also distinguish between lamino-dental and apico-alveolar points of articulation for each series, transcribed and respectively. is pronounced as an affricate, , in word-initial position, and as a voiceless palatal plosive, , in word-medial position. is a laminal pre-palatal fricative, while represents , an apico-alveolar fricative, with a slightly retroflexed tongue tip. In linguistic publications using Americanist phonetic notation the alveolar plosive series is distinguished from the dental one with the addition of under-dots: ṭ ṭʰ ṭ’; the palatal consonants are written č čʰ č’ š; the alveolar affricates are written c cʰ c’; and the voiceless nasals, semivowels, and liquid are written using capital letters: M N W Y L. There are a number of restrictions on the distribution of the various phonemes. , , and are relatively rare in Eastern Pomo. Voiceless unaspirated (plain) stops; voiced stops; voiceless nasals, semi-vowels, and voiceless ; and the fricative never occur in word-final position. never occurs before , and very rarely before and . only occurs at the beginning of syllables, and only occurs word-initially before and in words borrowed from Spanish. The voiceless nasals don't occur before the vowels and . The various pronunciations of the rhotic are complex. Syllable-finally, it as a voiced alveolar trill, , though word-finally, it has a fricative release. Word-medially, it is a voiced alveolar flap, . It is more frequently found initially in unstressed syllables than in stressed syllables, and occurs most commonly in syllable- and word-final position. Syllable Structure The most common syllable structure used is a two-syllable form, CV:CV(:)(C)(C), with primary stress on the second syllable (where "C" represents a consonant, "V" represents a vowel, ":" represents vowel length, and items enclosed in parentheses indicate that the position is optionally filled). An example of this is , "maggots to move around on something; many blackbirds to be in a field." In word-medial position, the syllable boundary falls before the final consonant in a sequence. For example, the structure [CV(:)(C)(C)(:)] is used for non-final syllables in words. Non-final syllables in words will end in C, CC, C:, or CC: only if another syllable beginning with a consonant follows. Word-final syllables can take the shape CV:CC. The following words illustrate possible syllable shapes for words in Eastern Pomo: