best accounted for systematically by an underlying syllabic nasal, since it occurs with some approximants, as well as with voiced plosives. Consonants The forms enclosed in brackets show the orthography used by Sapir/Herzog; other forms are the same. Segments and probably have only allophonic status. Word initial occurs only in loans from English. The fronted or "dental" nasal occurs in only a single word, but that word meaning "possessive" is very common. Consonants here called "breathy" are those termed "emphatic" by Sapir. The plosives are here marked with a superscript hooked h (), while the continuants are marked with a subscript diaeresis. The contrastive use of this feature defines a major isogloss separating Jabo from Glebo. Implications of the Jabo evidence for linguistic theory The metalinguistic import of the Jabo tonemic repertory becomes apparent when the attempt is made to select phonological distinctive features to represent the tonemes, whether binary or n-ary features. This in turn has implications for linguistic universals. However, the possibility exists that Sapir's analysis is overdifferentiated (i.e., the transcription is too "narrow" to claim tonemic status). This tonal system implies an extremely high level of significative functional load to borne by pitch in the language. As such it has been cited over the years by a number influential theorists in the phonological field, such as Trubetskoy and others. A similar situation exists in the vowel space postulated by the Sapirean analysis. Since tongue and jaw position, nasalization and pharyngealization are all significative in this model, the vowel space is crowded indeed, with from 19 to 22 possible vowels, not counting diphthongs or long vowels. The emphatic consonants of Jabo were once thought to be an example of the emergence of an implosive consonant series. There currently does not seem to be any evidence to suggest this. Literacy and educational proposals Glebo (Seaside Grebo) had possibly the earliest literary history of any speech variety in the Cape Palmas area, dating to the time of the missionary efforts associated with Maryland in Africa. Nonetheless, Jabo, rather than Glebo, has been proposed by the SIL survey as the basis of a unification orthography or Ausbausprache for the speech varieties of the Southern Grebo group, despite the prestige and precedence of Glebo. This choice may be due to Jabo's preserving a number of "archaic" features from the proto-language, if it is indeed the case that its highly differentiated phonology reflects