the two high vowels, and . The vowel lowers to become the mid vowel in instrumental prefixes. The vowel lowers to become the mid vowel if followed by or and another . Consonant Ablaut: This process affects aspirated stops (plosives) except , and the fricative . When aspirated stops are in morpheme-final position, and are followed by a morpheme beginning with a vowel, the aspirated stops (other than ) deaspirate to become the corresponding unaspirated stops, and becomes . For example, , 'two', becomes , 'two (things)'; and , 'to shoot' becomes , '(someone) shot something'. Deletion: This process affects suffixes beginning with the vowels or , or with the consonants or : Vowel Deletion occurs when the morpheme before a suffix ends in a vowel, the suffix begins with /i/ or /a/, and the rest of the suffix does not consist only of this vowel. An example of this is the morpheme, {-aya}, indicating 'plural'. Consonant Deletion occurs in a similar situation, except instead of the vowel initializing the suffix, it is either or , and the previous morpheme ends in a consonant. This can be seen in the morpheme, {-yiNàl}, indicating 'indirect object'. Morphology The most important processes of Eastern Pomo morphology are suffixation and prefixation. There are half as many morphemes that serve as prefixes than suffixes. Other processes used are reduplication and compounding. The verbal or non-verbal function of a morphological unit is specified by the addition of inflectional suffixes, and/or syntactic relations. The inflectional suffixes fall into categories creating morphological classes; mainly, verbs, animates, substantives, and four minor classes, adverbial indefinites, locatives, directionals and directional preverbs. There are also uninflected words, which include proper names, interjections and syntactic particles. Verbs Verbs are morphologically the most complex and syntactically the most important. There are eight optional position classes of suffixes for verbs, specifying categories of aspect, mode, plurality, locality, reciprocity, source of information (evidentials), and forms of syntactic relations. Stems may be inflected as a verb by means of suffixation, prefixation and reduplication. Animates Animates have two subclasses, pronouns and kinship terms. They are inflected for subject, object, genitive, and comitative through the processes of suffixation and partial suppletion. Kinship terms distinguish between a person's own relative and another person's relative by means of suffixation and suppletion, and occur with two sets of possessive pronominal prefixes. Substantives Substantives have five subclasses, personal nouns, adjectives, nouns, demonstratives,